aethereal

So in terms of should moonbeam (or zapp) be part of the ST rotation -- do stalker epic snipes get damage bonuses from +to-hit the way that Blaster snipes do? If so, are people making the comparison with that in mind? It seems like with offensive adaptation, the uptime of build-up for a stalker, and potentially things like the kismet +to-hit special enhancement, or tactics or something, it could make a noticeable difference.

Five-slotting Boundless Energy with a set that includes lots of things it doesn't need (end/recharge) seems like... a lot. It's got the 7.5% recharge, obviously. But you could get the same things minus the set bonuses by dropping two slots and doing the panacea proc + two common heal IOs, I think.

I run on a Mac, on Catalina, so I don't have access to Mids. So I'm looking for a build, but more so, I'm looking for like... philosophy. Approach, and maybe some discussion. Some questions on my mind: 1. What should I take and slot in bio? Is Genetic Corruption any good? The sleep component seems obviously not great, but what about the damage debuff (damage debuff plus sandman proc for a bit more survivability)? How about Parasitic Aura? 2. With a bio armor brute, I slotted DNA Siphon as a proc-bomb, but I'm wondering if, with the lower HP pool and resist caps of a stalker, should I do it more as a pure defensive power? 3. What's the overall approach to maximizing survivability as a bio stalker? S/L defense? non-S/L resists? Just lots of recharge to keep your clickies at the highest uptime? Shadow Meld as a panic button? I've never had Shadow Meld, I understand it has a very long (3s) animation time. When does the defense actually kick in during that animation time? 4. In terms of attacks, how possible is it to get to almost entirely assassin's strike/freezing touch/moonbeam ST rotation? Not entirely, right? I'm gonna need ice sword to be fairly in there as a filler? With stalker base damage/crits, I want to get my attacks to 90% damage enhancement before worrying about procs, right? 5. It seems like this character is not going to generate a lot of stacks of assassin's focus. Do we worry about trying to get auto-crits on assassin's strike, or just use it on cooldown? 6. I've got Frost five-slotted with Positron's Blast plus one more dam/range enhancement from a yellow set. I was thinking that once I'm 50, I'd +5 boost the orphan damage/range. Not sure where that will leave me in terms of total frost range, I'm at 12.68 feet now at level 32. Is there value in chasing more range enhancement here? 7. Any particular comments about actually playing this combo?

It sounds very unlikely that there are existing hooks in the code for a power's PPM calculations to be generated separately for different procs.

Well, killing you doesn't do anything other than waste your time, either. On some level, the challenge of CoH is efficiently achieving rewards. If someone can blast through Nemesis groups without paying the tax for waiting out the PFFs, and someone else does, then the person who can finesse the PFF is getting a reward for their skill (or for their character having like good holds, or whatever).

You make a pretty strong point. I will say that there's a challenge bar to trying to avoid it, on some characters at least (time a knockdown to give you a chance to kill them before they can activate, for example), so it to some extent rewards play skill with faster progress. But probably it's a minority of characters who can actually do that?

Just out of curiosity, does that 95.02% of attacks hitting not count streakbreaker attacks? Because the true rate of hitting should be higher than 95% due to streakbreaker. Basically, to get 100 attack rolls, you should get 105 attacks, since about 5 attacks should miss, triggering streakbreaker next. So you should have about 100 hits from 105 attacks (95 normal hits, 5 misses, 5 streakbreaker hits), 95.24% of all attacks hit, including streakbreaker. So 95.02% would be a little low.

No stun damage procs, right?

This is similar enough to the Rad Melee AoE mechanic that I think it's not a fruitful approach. If you want your ST attacks to become AoE attacks in a fists-energy-based melee set, I mean... Rad melee is a good set.

Yeah, I've never really bought the whole argument that Doms can't have Illusion Control because it doesn't benefit enough from Domination. I mean, that'd be fine if Illusion weren't the basis for some obviously extremely powerful characters. And if it didn't strongly benefit from high global recharge, just like Domination. Does Illusion Control, of all control sets, really need to synergize super, super well with Domination in order to be good?

Is there a significant hurdle to getting Scorpion Shield? You can change your alignment in zero minutes, and Black Scorpion's patron arc can be easily run in an afternoon. My understanding is that even in ATs that have access to Ice Armor, Scorpion Shield is still the meta. So it doesn't feel like adding ice armor to Defenders/Corruptors would be increasing max powerlevel significantly. This seems a pretty unobjectionable suggestion from a minmax/power creep perspective.

We are probably not at a point where it's very fruitful to give generally directional advice on how to revamp Energy Melee. It seems likely at this point that they have a general approach and are settled on it at least until it gets publicly tested (and potentially found either acceptable or flawed).

Note that it's 6' from the target that you hit, not a 6' radius around you. It's a targeted AoE.

What i actually want to know is, uh, the title. Is work ongoing or stalled? It's a different world than it was a month or two ago. If nothing has gotten done in the last six weeks because, you know, whatever, key members of the team are now spending all their time on childcare, or, taking care of elderly relatives or they work in hospitals and are overwhelmed or whatever else, that doesn't bother me, lots of stuff is more important than CoH development, including simply making sure that one's life feels relaxed. If in the other hand there have been a bunch of private betas and they're actively working through ideas and they just aren't ready to show off yet, that's also fine. I'm not asking for an eta or a feature list or anything, I just want to know if the last two months "count" or not.

I also just played against the Shadows, and they floored my regen, so I don't know if it has some regen debuff resistance, but definitely not a ton.

Also, I haven't explored the numbers very well, but I play a /bio brute and as far as I can tell, bio's debuff resistance is awful.

I mean, there's a reason why Fiery Aura is the premier armor set for farming -- the additional damage is large. And as people mentioned to you, it has slow resistance. Does Fiery Aura need regen debuff resistance? Fiery Aura characters don't get significant amounts of regen. Most sets get no end drain resistance. KB resistance is easily closed with IOs. The real problem with Fiery Aura is not, I think, its debuff resistance, it's that it's a pure-resist set with relatively low resistances to common damage types.

This is not a complaint! This is all volunteer stuff etc, I don't want to sound like it's anyone's duty to produce content on any particular schedule. That said, there's been radio silence for quite a while on page 6, and I was just wondering in terms of my future plans, whether this is something where someone's free time that was going to making page 6 is now being sucked up into childcare or something like that. Or if things are chugging along behind the scenes, but there's nothing to show yet.

Could we get an illusion-style "matches the current costume of the character" option for Vorpal Judgment?

The fact that people might dislike some of the visuals for an armor set (or any set) that they like mechanically creates tension away from the mechanically "best" sets. The end result of allowing people to turn off visuals for every set is pressure towards the meta sets. It's an increased number of players who are like, "Oh, yeah, I wanted a human-torch-style fire guy... so I made a TW/Bio Scrapper. I use the flaming sword, turned off all visuals for the armor, and use a flame aura." I think that the game benefits from pressure away from the few most common meta sets. And I also think that the game benefits from people who do none-the-less want to play a meta set thinking about how to actually build a character who aesthetically and by bio and so forth actually trying to build a superhero who "matches" their sets. Is this me imposing my preferences on other people? Sure. It's a social game. If you build your own private server, I couldn't care less what you do there. This one is a shared playground. Now, I'm all in favor of a variety of thematic visuals for each power. I just don't want them to be entirely absent, unless they're things that are thematically invisible, like willpower or invulnerability.

I don't want invisible fire to be possible, or invisible rocks/ice. I wish the bio armor minimal fx options were less minimal. Less obtrusive toggles? Sure. But the game is better for tying powers to visuals. It encourages people to use powers that aren't just the meta. It encourages then to think about their character's theme and legend.

As I said in the first post, I'm not advocating wholesale changing every damage power. I'm saying let's know what the "right" damage is so that when we do revisit a set, we can just say things like, "okay, for this power, I'm just normalizing the damage." The thing I object to, I guess, is when we end up saying, "to fix battle axe, let's lengthen recharge times of a bunch of powers until they eyeball right." That's just so hacky.

Yes, longer cast times would raise the damage of powers.

It's not about what the game shows, it's about how powers are balanced. Right now, most powers in the game follow a formula that bases their damage on their recharge time (and the size of the area that they affect if they are not single-target). Longer recharge = higher damage. Cast time is not taken into account. A power with a 12s recharge time and a 3s cast time gets the same damage as a power with a 12s recharge time and a 1s cast time. It's a guideline, not a rule, and there are intangible factors that affect damage beyond recharge, but it's a guideline that leads to a bad result. We should start from a basis that makes some amount of sense, and then pile unquantified factors on top of that, instead of starting with a nonsensical rule and then trying to balance on top of it.

The dirty secret of CoH balance is that damage of powers is based on their recharge time, but the controlling factor for the DPS of characters is heavily controlled by the cast time of powers (especially in a high-global-recharge world). Because of this, the DPS of saturated attack chains of various different comparable sets may vary by 2x or more. Everyone knows that DPA is at least as important as recharge time, arguably much more important, but we still use a damage formula that totally ignores cast time of a power and then we kind of try to mix in DPA in the non-quantitative eyeball-it stage of balance. This is nuts. Why don't we just come up with a new damage formula that weights cast time some amount? There even is one in the game, the PvP damage formula! If we established a new damage formula, either one that uses the same ratios of cast time vs recharge time as the PvP formula (but uses area factors like the current PvE formula), or one that weights them a little differently, we could have a target to shoot for in terms of all these sets that overperform or underperform on DPA. I'm not crazy enough to suggest that then we change the damage values of all damage-causing powers, that would obviously be a cluster. But just having a normalized value to compare with would let us make more sensible decisions when we did have balance passes at individual sets, and we could incrementally move towards a more sane world. The target would be a guideline, not a hard rule, just like the current damage formula, but it would be something we could have sensible discussions around, rather than, "Well... the damage formula is 'right' for this set but we all know that the result is absolutely godawful so let's 'nerf' the recharge times of all the powers so the set will be better."