aethereal

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.

I know that you didn't suggest moving to click mez. I was just giving an example of a change which is at least arguably a QOL change while affecting a combat power (as opposed to for example QOL changes that are about moving through zones easier). However, you did suggest adding two new powers to SR, Enduring and Master Brawler. Yes, I know, they exist in sentinel SR. Adding them to other SR sets is adding new powers to those sets, and is a balance-affecting change that is not QOL.

Do you mean "agree to agree on the first two"?

No, they can't. The only useful meaning of "QOL" changes is, "Benefits that do not affect or only negligibly affect main combat balance." Going from click mez protection to toggle mez protection? At least arguably QOL. Moving AoE defense earlier in the set purely by rearranging powers? At least arguably QOL. Introducing a new power with new significant combat functionality? The very definition of "not QOL." It'd be nice if people could stop trying to sneak balance changes into proposals for QOL just in terms of usefully labeling threads so people can know how to map their interests to which threads they read.

These aren't quality of life changes, they're balance changes. I agree that SR needs some mild buffs, but I'm unconvinced that these are the right buffs, they feel like they just push for greater armor set conformity. I'd rather that SR got some weirdo buff that wasn't a heal, absorb, or end tool. If you want a defense set with heals and end tools, Ninjutsu exists. So does Energy Aura. If you want a minimal-fx, good armor set that can be themed to natural characters, willpower exists, and honestly invul isn't terrible for this. I'd rather we combined two passives and gave SR, like, a targeted telecharge attack that, I don't know, did minimal damage and gave a short-term recharge buff or something. 5 second duration 1 second cast, 30 second timer crashless god-mode? I don't know, something weird.

I don't feel like I understand the design goal for procs. What are they supposed to do? Is the idea to allow people to improve average performance at the cost of unreliability? Is that... actually something that anyone wants? Certainly, in practice people seem pretty dedicated to maximizing reliability. Is it just supposed to be a complicated system that allows people who have additional systems mastery to improve their performance by demonstrating mastery over fairly complicated game mechanics? Is it supposed to make powers more diverse (if so, we have too many damage procs), and the unreliability is beside the point? I don't really get it.

Sirens song, I believe. It's a big cone sleep in sonic blast.

Everyone can skip this reply unless they are interested in some musing about how balance works in CoH. * * * So something that this thread has been really helpful for is making me think very long and hard about how relevant it is to get a certain capability "for one power pick." I find it a surprisingly nuanced question. Like, let's take SR. What if we took one of the toggles of Super Reflexes and folded all of its abilities into another toggle, and then replaced the first toggle with some kind of utter garbage power. Is SR better as a set? I mean... yes? Kind of? But not a lot better? You get 24 powers by level 50. That's enough for all of your primaries and secondaries, hasten, combat jumping (or hover), a travel power, and boxing/tough/weave. If you want powers from your epic pool, or stealth or maneuvers, you've got to find primary/secondary powers to drop (or get by with ninja run/P2W powers). But there are few (no?) primary/secondaries that currently really demand 18 power picks, so... If you have 3 skippable powers in your primary/secondary, you can get to the final tier epic power. If you have 5 skippable powers in your primary/secondary, the marginal value of an additional power pick is very low indeed. Much more important than power pick efficiency is overall set efficiency. SR currently has 8 pretty takeable powers, you definitely skip Elude and might skip the power that gives +20% recharge. If it replaced Elude with a good solid self-heal, it would be a better set, despite having fewer skippable powers. If it combined two of the toggles and replaced one of them with Elude 2.0, people would still kind of say, "Well... it's FINE, I guess." It's obviously the case that Farsight is a good power. Would Time as a set be much worse if it had Farsight I (with 6% defense) and Farsight II (an auto-power that buffed Farsight I to 12% defense, or a toggle that gave 6% defense, or something like that), and gave up Temporal Selection or Time Stop? I mean... it would be worse. I'm not sure it'd be much worse. People get caught up in "This power is worth THREE OTHER POWERS," and that sounds like a bigger deal than it is.

Hell, I would even say like a slash command for like so: /postallsalvage [common|uncommon|rare] [price] So for example: /postallsalvage common 250 This would take all your common salvage and put it on the AH at a sell price of 250. You could then macro these. And it would be sweet.

Dude. It was the fourth sentence of the post.

I recently got Savage Leap on a character. In terms of UI/playstyle, it's a lot nicer than other teleport-type powers, since it pops you to a target instead of a ground reticle. Obviously, there are things that are nice about the ground reticle, but it's just fussier. And powexeclocation doesn't fully solve its problems, since that's still a line of sight reticle under the hood. For example, I often, in buildings, jump up a bit to see some mobs on a different floor and then savage leap into the middle of them. I'd never try that with powexeclocation, even if there theoretically was a line of sight at some point, my experience is I'd almost certainly teleport nowhere. So it'd be nice if we had an option to get at least other short-range target-focused teleports (Lightning Rod, Shield Charge, Burst of Speed) to behave the same, and honestly I wouldn't say no to having the OPTION to have all teleports, even plain old vanilla travel power teleport, work the same. Some ideas for how this could work: A Null the Gull flag changes the behavior of the power. (most preferred) When you take these powers, you get two powers (a la switch ammo), which share a cooldown, one of which is a ground-target and the other of which is a target target. (least preferred) if you use them while targeting someone they pop you to target, otherwise they bring up the ground reticle. A new powexec command, or modifier for powexeclocation (like /powexeclocation target:force lightning rod) that worked for these powers only that let you create macros and binds that give the full Savage Leap-style experience. Mutually exclusive chosen-at-power selection versions of the powers that work differently, a la how Sentinel mez protection works in Super Reflexes

That's a laser broom. HTH.

How would that work though? Like, how would you get the altitude to glide down from in the first place? You could like go through the doors on the (relatively few) buildings that have doors to the roof and then jump off, and that'd be, you know, conceptually fun, but I don't think it would make for a functional travel power.

More so, something definitely isn't a trap because you could theoretically possibly discover it and avoid it. Like, can anyone reading this thread say that they found out about the AH pricing of enhancement converters without being pointed there by another player? Sure, some people have stumbled upon it -- probably a handful out of thousands of players. That doesn't mean that it's practically possible for people to discover it.

The idea that we're terribly infringing on people's god-given liberty to spend 100 merits on an ATO instead of spending the same 100 merits on enough info to buy three ATOs is stupid. Nobody is proposing taking anything away from people. I'm sure that there's somebody out there who for some insane reason thinks that there is an advantage to them to buying an ATO for 100 merits. That person is wrong, but I don't want to argue with them. They can continue to pay 100 merits for an ATO. But the vast majority of people who spend 100 merits for an ATO aren't doing that because they made a considered decision, it's because it's completely not discoverable that you can get massively increased efficiency out of your merits by spending them on enhancement converters, then selling the enhancement converters on the market, versus just buying an ATO. There is no reason to suspect that this is the way to get much more for your merits. Unless you either read the forums (or other sources of player community info) or else make a habit of looking up literally everything in the game on the AH all the time to figure out what sells well, it's just not discoverable.

I am not double adding, and my example was well short of the cap. You are correct, enhancements are part of the cap, if you have a kin or two, or eat a tray full of large red insps, or whatever, you will not see a difference between damage enhancements and no damage enhancements. But, critically, the cap isn't that important unless you always play with someone casting fulcrum shift, or you're farming. Most people, even on 8 man teams, will not be at damage caps unless that team includes a kinetic.

I disagree. It's entirely possible that we have a rump population of 20% or so who could engage more with the game if they were given a chance, and I think it's worthwhile to target them.

You're overlooking normal enhancements, which shift things somewhat. A stalker with a 100 damage base attack almost certainly enhances it to +95% damage, so 195. A brute, if he does that, gets to 146.25. Now let's assume 80 fury, so that's a further 160% damage (of the base 75), leading us to: 266.25. If a stalker is on an 8 person team, his basic crit chance pretty exactly closes the difference between 195 and 266.25, so then the auto-crits from hide and the proc hide and the superior build-up uptime (build up is also better for Stalkers than Brutes) and the presence of his really high-damage Assassin's STrike certainly causes the stalker to pull ahead. Solo, it's a bit more of a matter of whether the stalker can actually effectively broker the auto-crits (etc), or whether he leaves a lot of that on the table.

If lots of people switched from buying converters to buying inf directly, and we seeded the market with converters at a somewhat higher cost than is typical now, the net effect would be to sink inf, not create it. If there are large numbers of people who are currently stockpiling merits or spending them in inefficient ways, who would convert to selling them for inf, it would inflate.