aethereal

Okay, guys, real talk: 1. Any player willing to spend a few minutes learning to make inf and buy set IOs, and either read through set descriptions or copy builds off the forum, can already make a character who is significantly more durable than "godmode" was back in the day. There are only a few sets that benefit to any real degree from a short period of increased durability (mainly, pure-resist sets on the 75% resist-cap classes). For other power-sets, you're at most benefitting the people who stubbornly resist using IOs. 2. Given #1, almost nothing is going to be worth a crash. Even if a careful player could get value out of a crash-power, they're just OBNOXIOUS and fiddly and most people are not going to want to play a crash power. Look at the wailing and gnashing of teeth that we had here when there was a suggestion made to make Rage have a totally avoidable crash! 3. Also, armor sets and armor ATs are strong! We do not need to give Brutes a big buff. Like that is literally the last thing we need. There are all kinds of fun offense-oriented T9 powers you could give, but they would take already extremely strong characters and give them a big buff.

The old crashing god-mode T9 armor powers are broadly bad. This is a suggestion for thematic, choosable powers. This suggestion flagrantly violates the cottage rule. In general, I have been looking for relatively low-power T9s, just not utterly useless, because in general armor sets are quite good, and huge buffs for them are not necessary. Super Reflexes Clickable +to-hit (maybe 10%), +recharge (maybe 50%), +damage (maybe 20%), mez protect all to a high degree (clickable while mezzed). 20 second duration, 4 minute recharge, no crash, moderate endurance cost (maybe 10?). Rationale: SR needs a little oomph. It doesn't need any more defense, obviously, and I think giving it heals or resists is a bad idea, but the common complaint is that all it gives you is defense. This gives you a thematic burst of speed to help you deal with tough enemies, and damage and recharge are basically always welcome. It's not perma-able. Invulnerability Auto-power. When enemies attack you with a melee-tagged attack, they have a small chance (10%) to proc a knockdown on themselves as they literally bounce off you. For Brutes only, the same proc gives you a mild bonus Fury amount (5ish?) Rationale: Invul is fine, but kind of low-key. This doesn't really have that much game effect, but it feels like it's a flavorful, prestige ability. Like, "Suckers!" The Brute thing is to keep it from being a net negative to fury gen for them. Electric Armor For Scrappers/Stalkers/Sentinels: +10% def-all, +big number regen (I don't know regen numbers well), +20% self heal at initiation, no crash, moderate endurance, 30 second duration, 5 minute recharge. For Tankers/Brutes: Not sure, honestly. Maybe just the above. Rationale: Electric Armor is a good set for tanks/brutes and a not-so-good set for the 75% resist-cap ATs. Those ATs really could use a burst of survivability, but giving more resist is unlikely to help survivability in the current environment (they'll already be at or close to cap in most resists), and the crash isn't worth it. So we give them a no-crash power that is likely to substantially improve their survivability. For Tanks/Brutes, the set doesn't really need a buff, but it would be nice to give them the opportunity to turn into a lightning monster every once in a while. Energy Aura Toggle: When active, -10% def-all, and you proc energy damage on all of your attacks for an expected bonus of +20% damage. Rationale: Energy Aura does not need a buff, this is a flavorful but not-very-good power that you could take some prestige factor when steamrolling content.

Scrappers crit less often, not more often, than Stalkers under basically realistic conditions (which is good, because Stalker base damage is lower). The math is really complicated, but long story short, a scrapper has a 16% base chance to crit better-than-minion-class PvE enemies (assuming Superior Scrapper Strikes ATO), and it would take extraordinary abuse of the PPM mechanic and a textbook perfect attack chain to get the uptime of their other proc to be more than one attack in four, so 16% normally plus 50% one time in four. A stalker has 10% base, plus every fourth attack can be an auto-crit AS, plus the PPM of the "go into hide" ATO is twice what the PPM of the Scrapper "get 50% crit rate" proc is, so if we imagine that Scrappers can get to one attack every four uptime of their proc, stalkers should be able to get one-attack-every-four of auto-crit-from-hide, and that totally swamps the lower base rate. That's without imagining a team, in which case a stalker can get 30% crit rate totally ignoring their actual crit mechanics.

As far as I'm aware, nobody has yet demonstrated the ability to add animations to the game. Maybe we'll get there eventually! But you'll be more likely to get immediate gratification if you suggest animations that already exist and can be repurposed.

I think it reduces diversity of builds and harms immersion. I like being able to make some connections between what I see and what a Toon's strengths and weaknesses are.

I'm fine with, like, an alternate fire armor set in the vein of Soul Noir -- that is, a very different fx that is none-the-less thematic for fiery aura. And yeah, I guess spines-without-the-hand-spines doesn't upset me, but I don't like spines-with-only-the-hand-claws. I'm just saying that I don't want the fx and the numbers to become wholly disconnected from each other. It shouldn't be "you can use the sonic blast numbers with the energy blast fx." That's doesn't seem to be what you're specifically arguing for, but I do see a lot of people who say like "nofx options for most things really."

I'm not super into minimal FX for everything. The core logic and concepts of CoH is that specific power types do certain things better. Fire blast isn't "DoT blast," it's fire blast. Some things make a lot of sense to have minimal FX, like yes, you should be able to have SR characters who don't glow, that's intended to be a powerset that could represent just being exceptionally good at dodging. And some power FX seems like it's... just UI, not IC? Like that weird circle of lines that goes around you with one of the invul toggles. But I don't really want it to be the case that you can have fire armor and not have it look like fire armor, or there are claws-that-are-really-spines and spines-that-are-really-claws.

So here's an idea for how to make MA a little better and have its own thing. Yes, it's a light combo system. Design Goals: A lot of the draw of MA is that the animations are both quite unique in CoH (hardly any other melee sets have any kicks at all (StJ has two)) and also in my opinion, quite pretty. We would like to incentivize people to use those attacks -- this is particularly relevant since MA has a lot of single-target attacks and in the natural environment of CoH, high performance tends to mean building a short attack chain that never uses some of MA's six (!) single-target attacks. We would like MA to have its own unique mechanic, that is not a clone of how any other set works. We would also like this not to heavily compromise the current simplicity of the set. We want to make it a mechanic that you can use pretty easily and fluidly. We'd like to give MA a modest power-up. It's not a terrible performer, but it's not a top performer either. Proposal: Each attack in MA grants a separate short-lived (maybe 10 seconds) status effect to the caster. The status effect is non-stacking, so you can get the Thunder Kick and the Cobra Strike statuses, but not 2x the Thunder Kick one. Most of the status effects do nothing in and of themselves. Some of them maybe do a very minor buff, like give you some immobilize or knockback resistance. Focus Chi (aka Build Up) consumes all of these status effects. If it is triggered by itself, with no status effects, it's a normal Build Up. For each separate status it consumes, its damage bonus increases probably 5% (maybe up to 10% if this seems undertuned) and its duration increases... 1 second? 1.5 seconds? Somewhere in there. (Stalkers, with their drastically increased uptime for BU, may need lower values than other ATs). And that's it! Effects: There are 7 different attacks in MA. I don't think you can animate them all in under 10 seconds, so let's say that a reasonable person could get 5 buffs, meaning that their build-up gives +105% (or up to 130% if testing indicates that 105% is too low) damage for 15 seconds (or up to 17.5 seconds based on tuning) instead of +80% damage for 10 seconds. That's a big chunk more damage. It's a straight buff of the set. If you're happy with MA the way it is today, then you can continue to play MA the way it is today and you will occasionally see mildly better values out of Build Up. You don't need to engage with the system unless what's keeping you away from MA today is its performance. As a result, the simplicity of MA isn't particularly compromised. The very most complexity that anyone would engage with is "use Focus Chi after you attack several times." At the same time, it doesn't add more AoE and the extra damage is limited to Focus Chi's uptime. It's hard for me to imagine that this would be so good that it would be overpowered and shift the meta. Maybe Stalkers would require somewhat lower numbers, though this is a set with literally zero AoE, so it's kind of hard to see that as a terribly serious risk.

There thing down in attack type are the tags used for the purposes of determining which defenses are calling to this attack, if I'm not mistaken. So crowd control is defended by Merle defense or smashing defense, and frost is defended by aoe defense or cold defense. There is no "cone" defense, and cones will typically be defended by melee if in someone's opinion they're basically just big melee swings, and aoe if they seem more like area-covering powers. Which is clearly a judgment call.

Thanks. The names of the scales feels like it's a misnomer. When does the difference between ranged and melee actually cleave to the damage scale used? Just in (non-epic) pool powers? By powerset rather than individual powers?

One thing that I never saw discussion on during the focused feedback threads: are ranged attacks in the main powersets (not epics) of Brute and Tankers now doing more damage on test than they are on live? Like the claws and staff and kin melee and spines attacks? Or do they use melee damage scale despite being ranged?

As I said a bit up, it's not being treated as a simple bug. It appears, reading the tea leaves that HC staff would prefer some undefined lesser version of enterbasefrompasscode to the current enterbasefrompasscode, but they prefer current enterbasefrompasscode to no enterbasefrompasscode. And they don't seem to have a great sense of urgency that the lesser version must be pinned down. LRT was the definition of a marginal power before enterbasefrompasscode. With enterbasefrompasscode as it currently exists, it's simply useless. With some future lesser version of enterbasefrompasscode, it's going to be an even more marginal power. I submit that my "medium range teleport" option as a bonus on top of LRT would not have been overpowered even completely without enterbasefrompasscode, and in the current status quo it's probably not enough to rescue LRT from being a wasted power pick. In a future world somewhere between "no enterbasefrompasscode" and the current status quo, medium range teleport on top of LRT would be obviously not unbalanced.

Long Range Teleport, after its wind-up, presents you with a popup menu list of zones. When you pick one, you are transported to a particular (invariant) point in one of those zones (the list of zones is limited, I think basically no hazard zones). It's essentially a tram as a power. It'd have been very cool in the game at like the midpoint of its evolution, when the tram lines weren't unified, there was no Ouroborus, and there was just a lot less QOL in general. As it was on HC before enterbasefrompasscode, it was clearly not worth a power pick unless you were like, "Uh, well, I have literally nothing else than I want," but it provided you with some amount of moderately cool utility. But enterbasefrompasscode does everything that LRT does, and more, for free, at level 1.

Enterbasefrompasscode is at this point clearly not being treated as a straight forward bug. They've had many opportunities to lock it back down, and have chosen not to take them. They will probably change it eventually to something a little less wide open, but right now the sense appears to be: the status quo is imperfect, but preferable to just removing enterbasefrompasscode.

Wait, what? Defense and Resistance are under-served by existing set bonuses?

Teleport doesn't really bypass terrain. Actually, in a lot of circumstances, it has a harder time with terrain than either Super Jump or Flight, because it can be hard to make tight turns. Teleport also really struggles with big zones, at least at low-mid levels, because you run out of endurance in a way that you don't with the other three travel powers. There's nothing to make you feel superheroic like taking a break somewhere to catch your breath before resuming your hopping across the level. Teleport is the fastest travel power on a featureless plane or space, but its speed is often compromised by take-off/landing problems, due to the clumsiness of its terrain situation, especially in crowded landing zones, where you may have to make several extra hops to actually get to the door. And of course Teleport requires a ton of active clicking and management by the player. That's a big list of disadvantages. It doesn't have a ton of advantages to make up for that. But let's say that we think that making teleport mildly more powerful will omg-imbalance the game (hah!). Surely we can all agree that Long Range Teleport is just awful? Right now, it's completely obviated by enterbasefrompasscode (and yes, I know, that's supposed to go away at some point, but they sure aren't rushing taking it away), which offers no wind-up, no cool-down, and a much more comprehensive list of zone destinations, and, oh yeah, no power slot. Two load screens instead of one, but the load screen to get into a small base is usually less than the wind-up on LRT. And also by the way it's also obviated about 50% of the time by Ouroborus. And even if LRT weren't strictly worse than a slash command that every player has access to at level 1, it was never a great power. Getting to a tram/ferry was often just as fast or only marginally slower than the wind-up on LRT, and ultimately, end of the day, even when it did save you some time, all it saves is a small amount of time. Your character is no better at fighting, no better at escaping, no better at tactical movement. At least Afterburner gives you a slot for LotG and gets you to the trainer faster. My medium-range teleport idea wouldn't mean you could ignore moving through the zone. It wouldn't take you straight to a mission door. But it would let teleporters have something that they can do that other travel powers can't, that would save them a mild amount of time and give them some cool factor when everyone else is slogging from one end of IP to another. PS: Teleport also lacks a first-tier power that many or most builds want to take somewhere, like Combat Jumping, Hover, or Hasten.

I would like to see an additional bonus power added to either teleport or long range teleport. This power would, when clicked, bring up a pop-up menu of potential teleport targets in the current zone, and allow you to teleport to them after a short or no wind-up. In a standard world zone, those targets could be either the centers of each neighborhood, or else the zone features (tram, ae, arena, etc). In a PvP zone, there could be no features, to prevent the power from being used as an unfair escape mechanism. On most instance/mission maps, there could be no features, or else the zone exit could be a feature (which would trivialize a small number of missions in which there is a challenge in getting yourself, only, to the exit). The goal here would be to allow players who invest in the teleport pool to really feel like they have a unique ability to skip through space and quickly get around in a way that other players don't.

Maybe they don't feel great just beating on an unresisting foe? That was admittedly something that never felt great to me about the "more damage to stunned enemies" thing. But if I were responsible for theming it, I'd probably say something like the person was "charged" while stunned, you'd dumped so much energy into them that literally your fists were repelled by them. If you wanted to, you could only make it for your own stuns (which would perhaps theme better and would also solve concerns that you wouldn't play well with other people who do lots of stuns).

I mean, in the scenario where my idea was developed into an actual full release, you'd just make sure that the math worked out, so that it was overall a bonus. Like, I proposed that Total Focus do 150% of its current damage to an unstunned target! That's a HUGE bonus to an already very high-damage power, and you're guaranteed a chance at least once per enemy if you use it as your initiator. And my experience with Energy Melee is that there are certainly times when your enemies are unstunned. Having it be a little more thinky and be like, "Oh, I can use one of my powers that gives big damage against unstunned enemies" seems like the kind of thing that gives the set some unique character. The goal would be that if someone just did a naive attack chain and ignored stun statuses, you'd get a solid, first-tier single-target damage experience. Something that you can feel basically good about. If you were carefully managing your attacks so that you were maximizing the use of your extra-damage attacks, you'd have unparalleled best-among-melee-sets single-target damage. I think guaranteed stun is a lot better than guaranteed KB, chance to stun, comparing lightning clap and my proposed stun (I mean, presuming at least mag 3 and a decent length to the stun).

You could give stalkers less bonus damage than brutes and tankers get. I think it would be wrong to say, "more damage than their recharge/endurance account for in some circumstances, less in others" is penalizing a powerset. My suggestion is that the mainstay attacks would get no or very mild nerfs to their damage against stunned targets, and bonuses to their damage against unstunned targets. The ones that would get a serious nerf to their damage against stunned targets are already (at least arguably) situational powers: a big bonus to their damage against unstunned targets just gives them an actual situational role rather than being skips. A decently wide-area guaranteed AoE mez is a pretty cool ability, especially for a melee set. I don't know that stun would be a garbage power (though sufficiently high performance builds that don't need a panic button would probably find it skippable). Certainly less of a garbage power than it is now.

I don't think that the HC staff really care a whole lot about these kind of detailed suggestions for how to change a power-set. At most, they may read them to graze for some ideas to pluck out and use out of context, but I don't think that anyone is ever really going to go, "Oh, let's just do exactly what X said!" So I regard them as mostly exercises in freeform game design. That said, I think it's an interesting problem to try to make EM be an interesting, worthwhile set, on-par with other well-regarded sets like Street Justice, Fire Melee, Staff, or War Mace (not necessarily overwhelmingly good like Titan Weapons), without adding an explicit combo-style mechanic. So I like noodling about that even though I think there is roughly a 0% chance that my ideas will be adopted. So one of the things I often see people suggest is bonus damage to stunned opponents. I don't like that for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that hey, if we're dealing with a heavily-single-target set, that set should excel against harder opponents, certainly bosses, and also EBs, AVs, and GMs. All of those have escalating resistance to mezzes, and it kinda sucks to make your bonus damage be more available against targets least worth the time of a single-target-focused set. So what if we turn that around? How about bonus damage to targets that are NOT stunned? That feels kinda cool, and rewards a slightly more interesting play-style than "extra damage if stunned," where you switch targets once your stuns get through. And it naturally makes you better against targets with higher mez resistance, which is as I think it should be. Here's a general idea: Barrage: 90% of present damage to stunned targets, 150% of present damage to unstunned targets Energy Punch: 100% of present damage to stunned targets, 110% of present damage to unstunned targets Bone Crusher: 100% of present damage to stunned targets, 110% of present damage to unstunned targets Energy Transfer: 90% of present damage to stunned targets, 120% of present damage to unstunned targets Total Focus: 75% of present damage to stunned targets, 150% of present damage to unstunned targets (I'm sure the numbers would have to be tweaked and playtested. Think of them as directional rather than The Right Values). The concept there is that players can build an attack chain of EP/BC/ET and, if they choose, ignore this mechanic and just run it against people as normal and it's not wildly different. Mild buff overall. But they can use Barrage and Total Focus, which don't necessarily have a place in a current optimal EM attack chain, as burst damage initiators or whenever targets come out of stun. That leaves Stun. I continue to like a targeted AoE stun as the new version, and in this it self-limits to some extent, since stuns are a bit of a mixed blessing for you, which feels about right for giving a melee class an AoE mezz.

Yes, legal damage is bullets and blades, smashing damage is punches, kicks, clubs, staves, etc.

I wasn't suggesting any mechanics that interrelate to whirling hands, so the fact that the stalker doesn't get whirling hands isn't a response to me. I think that almost all characters get low on health from time to time, if they're willing to turn the challenge up high enough. And, hey, look, if you're on a faceroll all-Council team, no matter what we do with this single-target oriented set, EM is not going to be a great option. If you are somehow making a WP brute that's so very defensively strong that at +4/x8 solo against all enemy types you never dip below half health, man, okay. Maybe cut back on your slotting on your armor set, I don't know. But let me point out that the status quo is that people who are very, very, very interested in extremely high-performance builds are already avoiding EM, and that I'm not convinced that just giving back ET's old animation time would make the set attractive to people who are very, very, very interested in extremely high-performance builds. In other threads, I've seen people say that they don't want special unique mechanics around EM, that if they wanted to manage those kinds of mechanics, they'd play rad or psi or savage or titan or DB or even Kin melee. Which is a position I'm sympathetic to, but it does play into what I see as the core problem of making EM interesting: that it does very few things right now, and you can easily make the set be great at single-target damage with chance to stun and still have a couple powers left over to do... what? Be redundant? Be bad? Bad AND redundant? I already see advice on EM to skip Total Focus because you can build an attack chain out of Energy Punch / Bone Crusher / Energy Transfer. If we make Energy Transfer better than it is today, then that advice presumably gets more relevant.

iTrial Dayjob!

The bind solutions are pretty imperfect, so at least people are giving that up. A core skill of CoH gameplay is splitting your attention. Monitoring your health, your end, your power cooldowns, your status, whether you've been buffed or debuffed, etc. The major way that this game adds challenge to actual play is to ask you to monitor one more thing. You don't have to like that, but that is what the challenge mostly is, and having to notice your power is off cooldown and clicking it before your buff drops in the middle of battle is in fact an additional skill bar, and it is why we don't have more than one autopower.