aethereal

Uh huh. So I take that to mean that you do not in fact stand by your sweeping condemnation of diminishing returns? Look, there's nothing wrong with principled conservatism. The game is mature. I certainly don't endorse ripping out fundamental systems at this late date, even if those systems are pretty flawed. But it's kinda dumb to make a bunch of posts saying that it's actively desireable to have short, sharp increasing returns curves, that it's the only way to feel progress in the game, and then quietly ignore the question when asked about all the places that the game does have diminishing returns (which is to say almost every mechanic in the game besides defense and resistance).

So do you hate all the places in the game where we do have diminishing returns? Do you want to turn damage bonuses and recharge bonuses into increased returns? Or do you only like climbing the mountain for defense and resistance?

Sure, and you should get better. But when we're on an increasing rewards curve like happens right now, we see, well, the dysfunction that happens right now. And, in fairness, they did try to approximate this to some degree. Each point of defense that you get as you go along is more valuable than the one before, but in general it gets harder to get defense as you go along. You get your big meaty powers and then you're scrabbling for little pools or set bonuses. But a better design would be to have it be the case that there was lots of space between the very best mitigation and the second best and the third best, and that those things could gracefully degrade into each other, instead of having everyone crammed up at the same softcap and then any degradation in defense rapidly exposes you to multiples of damage. People can make reasonable choices about when they have "enough" mitigation instead of everyone just obviously shooting for softcap or within a point or two of it, and you can make defense debuffers that expose you to 20% more damage instead of 200% more damage.

Not getting worse, getting better more slowly.

I mean, I think that's a valid point. Seems like it would be very sensitive to a number of factors, and kind of hard to say without extensive testing how big a deal it would be -- and that obviously won't happen.

That's legit and sorry for misunderstanding you originally. You're saying that this kind of change would set up cascading defense failure in circumstances where normally it would not occur. That may be true. I guess I'm not clear how many enemy groups have minor defense debuffs that don't normally cross into cascading. Obviously the opponents that are super serious defense debuffers already provoke cascading failure on essentially any set besides SR. But there may be a new category of debuffers to worry about with a change like this.

You're misunderstanding DDR, it doesn't affect to-hit buffs. It affects defense debuffs.

So, in that spirit, let me expand a little: The basic problem with defense is the increasing returns curve from about 35->45. At low levels of defense, you barely notice it. Only once you're in your 20s do you even start to say, "Huh, I guess maybe I'm a little more durable?" Then in your 30s you start to get all, "Wow, I didn't think I would survive that fight, but I did!" (albeit with some other times when you get unlucky and don't), and then in the late 30's and 40's you run up this rapid curve into extreme durability in which you turn up your notoriety settings again and again. And the curve is equally fast and sharp on the way back down. Get your defense debuffed just a little and you're screwed. Enemies with +to-hit do multiples of your damage. Soft-capped characters are, via our stylized look at even-conn minions, 2x as durable as resistance-capped Tanks and Brutes, 3x as durable as resistance-capped Kheldians, and 5x as durable as any other resistance-capped character (and also they get protection from rider effects that have to-hit checks). And yes, it's not actually that bad, because we don't actually fight even-conn minions at these levels, but it's still pretty bad. Challenging soft-capped characters via just piling on more attacks and more damage is doable, but it enforces a defense strategy, because piling on that much additional damage will completely destroy resist-oriented characters -- it sharpens the meta on reaching the softcap. However, our strategies so far that disincent defense have been: defense debuffing, auto-hit attacks, attacks that hit common holes in defense (such as non-positional psi), and of course always-on to-hit bonuses in incarnate content. All of these strategies have a problem: they rapidly walk down that same sharp curve as soft-cap is approached. Your soft-capped character is invincible, a tank, until they hit a defense debuffer, at which point they're taking 5x, 10x the damage they were and they die instantly. My point is that this is dysfunctional. Better game design would have a diminishing rewards curve at the end, not an increasing rewards curve. If we were talking a game that was intended to be CoH-like but started from a completely blank slate, mechanics-design, you'd have a situation where a defense-oriented character would get meaningful durability immediately, upon their first investment in defense, and then as they walked up towards the end-game, they'd get less and less from each additional investment (but not nothing -- ideally, you'd always be getting something out of having a Forcefields character on the team). But we aren't starting from a blank slate mechanics-wise. My idea -- which again was never made with the idea that it would just be accepted and put into the game -- was to point out that you can in fact approximate some of that attack on the sharp curve of defense within the current mechanical framework, without the blunt hammer of just making every defense-based character very squishy. We just need to step beyond "defense debuffs, auto-hits, always on +to-hit." You can do this because high-end play in CoH involves a lot of attacks coming at you, and there are ways that you can make a subset of those attacks be more effective against defense characters without making ALL of those attacks more effective. (You could also have like one out of four attacks that an enemy makes have +5% to-hit. There are other ways). People react defensively because they've had it drilled into them that anything that bypasses a little defense walks them down that sharp curve to many multiples of incoming damage. That's not true of my proposal, and while my proposal will never be applied, it's useful to contemplate how we can mitigate extremely high defense without rendering defense characters useless.

It's worthwhile trying to get people in the suggestions forum to understand the mechanics of the game. This idea will certainly never be implemented, but if someone comes out of the discussion with a better understanding of how all these factors interrelate, that's a win.

If you have defense debuffs (and do not have strong ddr), you're already experiencing a much stronger effect than this anyways. Cimerorans, Arachnos, Banished Pantheon and others already hit you much more extensively than this concept would. And, by the way, they are far from unbeatable, which is another reason why all the railing and gnashing of teeth here is seriously overblown.

200% increase from damage taken from a single even-conn minion, sure. Which would change that minion from "not able to budge your green bar" to "not able to budge your green bar." Go have a softcapped character stand in a group of three white minions. That's the overwhelming power you'd be facing for ten seconds.

If you are softcapped and are fighting even-conn opponents, you have room to spare on your durability. You will not notice this difference. And if you aren't softcapped or near to it, you will see essentially no additional damage from this change.

Sure. But you can get to the point where you barely use ice sword, and the slower sword animation for assassinate still isn't bad, it's just not quite as good as other sets.

Ice melee is pretty good on a stalker. The deal with ice melee is normally, "Well, freezing touch is awesome, but one attack does not make an attack chain." Having assassin's strike as a second hard hitting ST attack gives the set a much more powerful attack chain, plus you can use the re-hide in assassin's strike into freezing touch to get your critical damage all up front, not as DoT. It has a cone and a pbaoe, you don't need to take frozen fists, you can take a snipe for a third hard hitting attack.

It's not really that much difference because that only applies to even-conn minions, and other enemies have a higher than 5% chance to hit you at soft-cap. But sure. The 5% of even-conn minions who procced this to-hit bonus would have triple the chance to hit you on their second and third and maybe fourth attacks, if they survived that long. If ten such minions attacked you four times each for 100 damage each, without this change you'd expect to take 200 damage (two hits). With this change, you'd expect to take about 250 damage. It's not totally insignificant, and if you were riding the ragged line of your challenge rating, you'd expect to have to lower your challenge rating. But it's a long way from giving everyone +5% to hit, especially when you consider that most minions and lieutenants do not survive long.

I mean, I explained that in the post you just quoted, in the part you didn't quote?

I think people aren't doing a very good job of understanding the level of additional challenge that this change would bring: not very much. A little, certainly. It might be that people would want to turn down their notoriety from +4/x8 to +3/x6 or so, depending on exactly how much they relied on exactly-at-softcap mitigation. But the effect of this change is that a few enemies would be mildly more likely to hit you at softcap, after the initial alpha. It's nothing like the level of additional power that a global +5% (or even +3%) to hit buff would bring. It's not intended to be primarily a rebalance or an additional challenge change. It's just supposed to make there be less of a sharp threshold from "increasing returns to def" as you go from like 35->45 to "almost no additional return to def" from 45 on. And in a world where this change was added, the primary threat to softcapped squishy characters wouldn't be whatever random minions procced the to-hit bonus, it would continue to be defense debuffers and cascading failure.

I'm not sure that the design goals of "similar sustained DPS to a scrapper, less durable than a stalker, better AoE and worse ST than a scrapper" are coherent ones. First of all: are scrappers bad at AoE now? This is kinda news to me. Stalkers, sure. But scrappers seem to me to have solidly good AoE, outside of maybe a couple of sets. Second: Is sustained AoE a thing? After a round or two of Scrapper-level AoE, aren't we down to targets that we might as well single-target? Third: If you do find yourself with a crowd that you can't burn down fast, isn't it going to suck having below-stalker durability and also (probably?) no way to get the enemies to group up? If you need to reposition and maintain range to survive, doesn't that tank your AoE DPS? I mean, I'm sure that people on the boards will design builds that can survive enemies getting close up, but going down that path leads back to "well, why not play a blaster," who will have way better AoE DPS and can be built pretty durable, too. I think Sentinel as a single-target specialist makes sense, and I think that's largely what they are today. Like a stalker, not in terms of stealth mechanics, but in terms of focusing damage on a single hard target and being durable enough to handle that single large target (but maybe not stand in a x8 spawn). Current opportunity mechanics certainly support that, both in terms of concentrating their excess damage on a single target, on that res debuff largely being wasted on anything that's not at the very least a boss, and in terms of defensive opportunity giving a sustain kind of thing. If I were interested in AoE, I certainly wouldn't play a current sentinel: tanks are great at AoE, brutes really are fine at it, scrappers are fine at it, and blasters are obviously great if you want something less durable. Obviously, any DPS niche in this game is crowded, but AoE specialists seem to me to be particularly so, while single-target specialism seems a little less crowded to me.

You appear to have some misconceptions about how things work. PPM is by no means a guarantee that a proc will happen X times per minute, or no more than X times per minute. Normal PPM just affects the chance to fire. So, imagine you had a single-target attack with two procs in it. Proc A has PPM 1, and Proc B has PPM 2. If the attack has a base cooldown of 60 seconds, and you do not slot any recharge reduction, then it looks at the PPM and says, "This attack can only fire once per minute, and so even if it's used on cooldown, it won't cause either proc to fire more than once per minute." So it gives both procs max (90%) chance to fire. Now suppose that you enhance it with 100% recharge reduction, lowering the cooldown to 30 seconds. Now the code says, "This attack can be used (at most) twice per minute. I'll try to make each proc have a rate such that on average, they will fire 1 and 2 times per minute." It sets Proc A's chance to fire to 50% (so if you use the attack 2x per minute, you'll average 1 proc activation per minute), and Proc B's chance still to max, 90% (so you'd expect 1.8 activations per minute). Ah, but now say that you also have 100% global recharge. PPM doesn't know about global recharge. Proc A's chance to fire will still be 50%, and Proc B still 90%. But the true recharge of the power will be now 20 seconds, so you can, at most, activate it 3 times per minute. At that point, you'd expect Proc A to fire 1.5 times per minute (despite its PPM of 1) and Proc B to fire 2.7 times per minute (despite its PPM of 2). It is eminently possible for each proc to fire up to 3 times per minute -- though you'd have to get somewhat lucky for them to do that. Now, there is an additional concern, which is that some (not all!) PPM procs also have a global cooldown, such that its proc chance to clamped to 0% for N seconds following an activation. We know that for example the heal procs in Call of the Sandman and whatever the new EndMod set is called do that. But we don't know whether the Stalker ATO proc does it. And that's what the OP is asking about.

I mean, I wouldn't object. I don't know if there's anyone out there who is somehow getting really good value out of AVs in the AE, but my use of it is "we do an AE mission once every several weeks for roleplay reasons," whether it gives rewards or not is fairly extraneous to me. One thing I could imagine doing if farming is a concern is putting "advanced options" into an AE mission behind a flag that says "no rewards for this mission." So like, you check a box saying, "Don't worry about balance, I'll just forgo rewards" and then you can maybe put in more-customized enemies or actually choose where clickies go or something. Seems unlikely that there is enough interest in this to be worth the dev coding time, but if the only thing that's stopping them from easily dropping in more AE functionality is concern about farms, gating that additional functionality behind a flag that turns off rewards would be, for me at least, a good happy medium.

Sure, that sounds like a good solution.

Right now, there's no way in the AE to have two or three AVs (or EBs) in the same spawn. You can do a little hack where you put only AVs (or EBs) in a custom enemy group and have a spawn of those, but then if the team that's fighting it is a large team (or has notoriety set to mimic a large team), you get a spawn of like 11 AVs which is a whole different thing. I would like to be able to say, "Fight an AV, but actually it's these particular named enemies, one of each." Let's face it, single AVs are not usually much of a challenge to a decent-sized team, and it would be very helpful for making a broad class of RP-oriented AE arcs. This does not seem to me that it would make farming any more efficient than it already is.

Lighting Rod summons what we call a pseudo-pet, which is to say a pet that was intended to get around some limitations in the powers engine. It doesn't take pet sets because it's not a "real" pet, but behind-the-scenes, it's coded as a pet.

I agree that people who say, "Blasters are plenty durable now, why do you need to sacrifice a bunch of damage for better mitigation when mitigation is already 'good enough'" are overly focused on the very tip-top of endgame with expensive builds. There's a pretty clear role for sents every place before that as durable ranged DPS, and if they pale in comparison to any AT in the levelling game, it's not blasters, it's scraps/stalks/brutes. I do think it would be interesting to imagine what a buff to sents would look like that both tried to give them more parity with scraps/stalks/brutes in the levelling game, and also gave them a bit more of a separate identity from blasters in the very tip-top of endgame, though.

Eventually his summoned bosses add enough to his DPS that he overwhelms my defenses and kills me. If I kill his summons, I end up just doing that, I barely get a chance to attack Recluse.