aethereal

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.

I mean, to be clear, I'm soloing him as a level 54 AV regardless. But yes, I'll try to handle him without the towers, I'm not sure I can at all.

Is he different in different places? I'm just using a mission from Mender Silos that has all of the big five Arachnos AVs available in a single mission (plus Silver Mantis). It's useful. I've got Degenerative Interface (albeit only T3 right now), Musculature Alpha (also T3), Vorpal Judgment (T2), Ageless Destiny (T2, which is enough to keep me in Offensive Adaptation indefinitely if I want to be), Warworks Lore (only T2 right now, so I could get pretty big DPS gains), and Assault Hybrid (T1 right now). So I think of all that as a pretty standard incarnate load-out. Sorry, I run MacOS Catalina, so I can't use mids and share my build, but I'm not doing anything crazy. My attack rotation is more or less Assassin's Ice Sword > Freezing Touch > Moonbeam. That's not actually a tight attack rotation, I'd have to sprinkle in Ice Sword a couple of times if I were just doing that, but between Build Up and my three Bio Armor clickies (and Hasten, and Agelesss Destiny, and so forth), I often end up dropping the Ice Swords and just using my three big hits. My durability is based on global recharge doctrine: I have perma-Hasten and perma-Ablative Carapace. My defenses and resists are unimpresssive in comparison -- I'm a little shy of capped S/L resist, and in the 40's on Energy/Neg-Energy/Fire/Cold defense.

Correct.

I'm on a mission to solo all the big name Arachnos AVs. The ones left in the docket are Scirocco and LR. I'm pretty sure I can figure out Scirocco, but I have no idea where to begin with the big guy. His boss summoning seems like a big problem and I don't know how to handle it. Any tricks here? I'm an Ice/Bio Stalker. I'm not completely tricked out yet, and maybe it's just a question of having a T4 Lore pet, but if not I'm not sure where to go.

Please do not buy ATOs with merits. For 100 merits, you can get 300 enhancement converters. These routinely sell for around 80k, minus a 10% AH fee, so 72k. 72k * 300 = 21.5M or so inf. You can buy ATOs for half that money. Just... friends don't let friends buy ATOs with merits.

A global increase in to hit would create pressure to build towards a 50% defense target instead of a 45%. It would increase the value of the few sets that can reasonably reach 50% and diminish the value of hybrid sets (it would also increase the value of pure-resist mitigation techniques). I think that making the incarnate content have a big global to-hit bonus was a bad idea. Having something where going over the 45% defense target has decreased returns, but not no returns, doesn't create the same strong pressure to just build to higher defense.

Since this isn't a suggestion that would ever be implemented, I didn't bother to create an exhaustive tracing of a million details, but yes, my suggestion was intended to be more-or-less global. Maybe, if this were actually being taken seriously, it would phase in and not affect very low levels (maybe 0% proc rate under level 10, maybe half the listed proc-rate from 11-20, or something). And obviously if someone wanted to actually do it, the numbers would all be subject to tweaking. Is it 5% proc rate for 10s for minions or 7% proc rate for 5s or what, who knows. Yes, procs off missed attacks, no, doesn't stack. And might there be particular enemies that need rebalancing for this? Sure, maybe. But the vast majority of enemies would not need to be rebalanced in light of this. Again, this is a low proc rate chance to have probably 1-2 attacks from this enemy have a mild to-hit buff. It's not going to turn groups into holy terrors. What it actually does is create a tier of diminished returns -- but not *no* returns -- on high defense. Low defense characters won't notice this. If I have 0 defense, fighting +0 enemies, and I'm fighting 10 minions, then after a particularly unlucky alpha strike, 3 of those minions will proc it (ie, this is 6x more than the expected case, a very unlucky set of rolls for me), at which point of the next wave of 10 attacks, instead of the expected case of 5 of them hitting, I'll see 5.3 of them hitting, for an expected increase in damage of 6%. For a defense-capped character, on the other hand, in the same unlucky situation, I'd see a scenario where instead of 0.5 attacks hit on round 2, 0.8 attacks hit, for an expected increase in damage of 60% (again, this is in the unlucky case where the proc happens at 6x higher than the expected case). Note that I'm still expecting less than one hit in the second round of attacks, and the alpha strike was fully mitigated. This is in stark contrast to the defense-halving idea that I took to be satire, which is more in the vein of creating a huge "hole" in defense mitigation, kind of in the spirit of things like psychic or toxic "holes." My suggestion isn't like that. It's a mild softening of defense at high levels to create a scenario where you say, "Well, yes, I'm at 45% defense for everything, but I do like it when someone brings Maneuvers onto the team and I get a little more mitigation."

Enemies do not attack at a particularly frenetic pace, and this proposed change is much more significant for high-defense players than low-defense ones. Very occasionally having an attack have a 60% chance to hit you instead of a 50% chance to hit is not going to radically change the difficulty of the game.

I think I'll stand on my record: I don't particularly like the end game, I've never in fact ground out a T4 incarnate ability, I play the leveling game much more often than the 50 game, I rarely group and I play on much higher than base difficulty. And I avoid the hell out of Council farms. As said at the beginning, this isn't a terribly serious suggestion, because it would change too much, but I don't think of it so much as a difficulty increaser. Yes, it would add a bit of difficulty for people invested in defense, but not a ton. It's more about creating a sort of tier between "pretty good defense" and "great defense." If you soft-cap, you have full resistance against alpha strikes and full resistance against 90% of other attacks, but you notice when you've got a widow or bubbler in your team, and the SR tank or brute has a bit more defensive ability than you do. That feels about right to me. You get sharply diminishing returns after soft-cap without it being almost no returns the way it is now.

This isn't a terribly serious suggestion. More... Something to think about. What if all enemies had a global chance to proc the following effect: +10% to hit, self only, for 10 seconds. Minions would have a 5% chance to proc it on all attacks, lieutenants 10%, bosses and above 15%. The idea here is to somewhat defray the value of defense, while not making it super useless, and to give more of a role to powers that have been made somewhat useless in a world of easily attainable soft-cap. Since it's based on a proc, defense would be just as good as it is now against an alpha strike. SR character's might have some use for Elude, Parry might see situational use, etc. Too big a change to do globally, but I think it's kind of interesting.

My understanding is that, in PvP, there is value in layering additional stealth on Hide, for stalkers. Do multiple stealth IOs stack, or just one and then I have to go the Concealment pool? Can I be functionally invisible as a stalker, or are builds with some +perception going to see me no matter what?