aethereal

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."

I wish there were some response to this, even if it's just someone saying, "I confirm that this is known to be impossible." Some things I've tried that don't work: 1. You can't have ambushes happen that are named characters, just groups, so I can't place one AV and then have other AVs ambush once the battle is joined. 2. If your custom enemy group includes any non-AV characters, (even just a single minion), then the entire group of adds around the placed AV will be non-AV members of the custom group. 3. Changing the "difficulty" of the group surrounding the boss does not scale down much -- easy leads to 11 adds (all of them AVs if any of them are AVs, as far as I can tell), hard leads to 20, at x8.

A chain power would be thematically satisfying, but I think it's a valid critique that the problem with elec blast is focused/single-target damage, its AoE is fine. Honestly, all it probably super needs is to increase the speed and duration of the sentinel and maybe the damage of the sentinel's attacks a bit. It gives up a hard-hitting blast for the sentinel, so it should get something comparable back.

I'm not sure that the caster of group fly outflies everyone. They outfly lower-level people (which would include anyone sidekicked up to their level -1, and unfortunately for the main use case for group fly, a mastermind's pets).

I would really like to have a group of three Archvillains spawn together. Is there any way to do this? I know I make an enemy group that only has AVs in it spawn around a "defeat a boss" detail, but that results in like... 11 AVs at large group sizes. Which might be a bit much. I want a number of AVs > 1 but < 11. What's the closest I can get to this?

You are incorrect, Achilles Heel is not unique. In general: There are already three different protocols for what can constitute an IO set. Maybe four, depending on how you count it. IO sets can be by "general type of power," like melee damage. They can be by specific power effect, like endurance modification. And they can be by AT, like ATOs. (If you count it differently, they can also be by like super-class of power, like universal damage or travel). Adding a new set that was like ranged damage, but only slottable by sonic blast would be weird, certainly, but not like a crazy modification to the IO system. And not having good IO slotting is important, and makes a considerable difference in what you can do with a build. Is better slotting the only thing that Sonic needs? No, as I said in the original post. But it could be a big help without the kind of serious undertaking that revamping an entire set is. We've seen in page 5 that it's relatively straightforward to add IO sets.

I'm not sure that's actually true in IO-land. Fire certainly isn't the top of the ST damage world. But regardless, my suggestion is mainly for Sonic, not Fire.

The goal is not to enhance the resistance debuffs, it is to give sonic blast access to procs and additional set bonuses. These sets would be like traditional ranged-damage sets: they would enhance accuracy, damage, endurance, recharge, and maybe range. The advantage that a set like rad blast has is not that you desperately want to make the defense debuff higher, it's that every blast in the set can take the -20% damage resistance proc. DP can take like five different procs per power. Energy Blast can take force feedback. And almost every other blast set just has a lot more options for puzzle-piecing in that last bit of, whatever s/l defense or recharge or ranged defense or global accuracy or whatever it is you need to make your build, because they simply have more total sets available to them.

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.