Kanil

agreed

now explain fire blast is it because everyone is already fire blast

i agree, +damage is the best and that's why empathy is the best also fire blast is undertuned because it only does damage unlike archery

i know it's not gonna happen, but i'd just like to see where the breakdown is in terms of what seems like a logical disconnect in 'tw is way fucked and it needs to be normalized to encourage people to pick other sets' while fire blast exists. like anyone who has done any real testing of the sets at absolute minmax performance, which seems like how tw is being viewed can clearly observe the gap between it and every other blast set. the difference seems to just be that it's a legacy set and not a meme because you still have yahoos out there arguing that something like elec blast's -end holds more value than fire blast just being better in every meaningful way than any other blast set (barring the obvious sonic blast for support chars) with literally no drawback at all unlike tw's momentum

i just want things to make sense in blaster town if tw is an outlier and is getting the buffnerf, whens fire blast getting the treatment

look on the bright side, at least tw users will go 'yeah it's op but you gotta deal with momentum' meanwhile, on fire blast:

so when is fire blast gonna get nerfed if we're talking about overperforming sets

Right!

yeah, i posted a followup in a diff thread, but doing the string without GPB or boggle yields pretty much the same results too, so GPB is a 'maybe' pick - i personally recommend it due to live play preferring big burst damage but in a sustained fight it doesn't make that much of a difference. vs. regular mobs it is VERY notable though

seems reasonable to me. i guess i don't see a downside to making defender support stronger since it won't end up stepping on toes of folks who have been enjoying those kinda numbers on non-defender powersets for however long they've been playing the game. it's overperforming in the scale of AT stuff, but if it's adjusted that way is it overperforming on the larger scale as well? i assume everything's relative to the overall game instead of within those rigid lines when you consider the buff upwards. this kinda buff would be something that would close the gap on cold dom being "the best" overall (barring traps triple acid mortar stuff) av/gm killer debuff powerset in the sense of giving dark some fighting power there would keep those choices more and more competitive rather than less, right? if you follow the same logic on sleet being technically weaker than it 'should' be despite being in that 'top' position by the nature of the rest of it's combined powerset, you get this weird train of thought where that top set should be buffed because of that. or alternatively, nerfing a set explicitly from it's original AT values because of those 'rigid' guidelines where Every AT Power That Does Thing Must Do This Value i guess it just goes back to a core thought process i've been wondering - it's a loose enough game to where that kind of power scaling is clearly enjoyable enough for folks to use the sets with that in mind, right? there's a couple of different angles to approach it from that all end up tryin' to appease different trains of thought of stuff, so why not go with something that steps on the least toes and fills in the most gaps in terms of keeping things enjoyable for the most folks while retaining that kind of overall logic? it's like... i don't see more people playing dark because of the nerf to tar patch, so what's the value gained in making less people happy if you can keep the overall logic being pursued in maintaining AT values? honestly going beyond that my personal thoughts are more based off of like, a long history with fighting games where a lot of my enjoyment ends up being the natural extension of tools being open enough in the game to be explored by the players, often with characters 'breaking the rules' of the game in ways that ultimately make them more fun because they gain more options off that than whatever the baseline is. recognizing those 'broken rules' being appealing to folks and then building around them in the design of new characters and changes rather than abiding by the original concepts is often times what makes 'new' things and balancing exciting for folks because they hope to see their preferred choice of character (no matter how weak) get stronger in the ways that appeal to them. the 'exceptions' like sleet and tar pit provide in the sense of being stronger than other sets is something that sticks out as novel and i think is somethin' that's part of the appeal of those powersets for other folks as well. i know for sure it bothers plenty of people too in that it falls out of Logic, but the line of 'logic' for this general direction of design is something that just perplexes me in the scope of design decisions for a game because it prioritizes an internal logic over people's existing enjoyment of stuff that doesn't stifle the game in any manner. i doubt anyone's gonna read this rambling mess but i'm stuck indoors and having a good time doin' it anyways, haha

yeah, i'm wondering this as well because it directly contributes to this feeling here: it'd be good to know what the baseline is considered as to be able to maybe clear that up a bit. it'll probably come up much more in the next page if TW is gonna get slapped down real hard but at the moment the speculative nature of knowing that Significant Negative Changes Are Coming (to whatever) combined with that general vague feeling end up reinforcing that type of response to these kinda changes. the explanation of 'it's standardizing AT stuff/it's fixing bugs' ends up feeling more like an excuse to rally behind because of how vague it is, even if that's where the thought process begins and ends from the dev's side. i guess in the end i ultimately don't understand the purpose of bringing stuff down in the context of the game being so casual to play in already and that being a really large part of what the appeal of the game is at a mechanical level. i totally grasp the power creep thing in the fear of buffing powersets in the scope of producing something like tac arrow again but the other direction is really baffling. what's the appeal to the, uh, "Pro Nerf Rhetoric" for folks? what part about it makes the game more fun? anyways to sum it up: give battle axe hurl

i guess the tag marks me here so i'll reply the times on strings without GPB i tested after making that pylon post and its actually almost the same. in a sustained damage sense there's actually no reason to use boggle+gpb because of that. however! the burst damage is very important in a live play situation because chunking bosses is significantly more important than 'sustained' damage so it's something that's very noticeable in live play

something like this. besides fire sword being procced out, it's very traditional which is probably part of what accounts for it's consistency

just checked for ya, roughly averages out to 2m. some small dips and gains to like 1m55s and 2m5s but sits pretty consistent. it's a bit weird in how much the melt armor enables variation but doesn't add a lot of 'consistent' time

Please fix this. I'm sick of being punished for being the first person to enter the mission on these TFs.

so, here's an example of the post-patch tanker damage on a variant of myshkin's bio/ss build: interestingly, testing the original string with regular punch and jab instead of cross punch drastically changes the results - it's actually slower in post-patch by 5-10s vs pre-patch results if i do my pre-patch string with jab and punch. using a new build with cross punch and the cross punch string (without testing pre-patch), you can see the obvious drastic difference. this is definitely on the really lucky end with no major whiffs, and it usually dips in the 2m-2m25s range but it's still quite good. to note this is running off the same caveat of starting with double-rage and having perfect rage timing on starting attacking, so major asterisks - the 2m marker is the hard line for the crash, and if the crash happens you outright lose 20s of damage. it's really not ideal. i didn't record any vids of it because i need to test it a bit more, but an additional side effect of the loss of bruising is that assault radial hybrid seems to contribute significantly less - the best possible time boost i've gotten is 1m45s, which is a far cry from the 2m30s->2m gain pre-patch. i have a bit of a gut feeling that it's possible that many builds lost ST damage because of the T1 change (and not being able to leverage somethign like cross punch) and the indirect nerf to radial hybrid damage for tanks by removing bruising. i'm still half and half on it, but yeah. i guess bio/ss made off pretty well with this patch. i seriously thought about not posting this because i'm already wary of playing this char for 'real' due to my gut feeling that SS is going to get extremely nerfed when it's already a set that requires a lot of 'caveats' to achieve this kind of performance (and is pretty middling otherwise based on my own testing with a more 'standard' build) but for some reason i just can't resist shooting myself in the foot, i guess

ah ha, that's it. the proccing out of the attacks! i didn't think to do that for claws-type attacks but that combined with weaken resolve brought my a time to like 1:40-1:45. still not as great results as i'd like (mostly because i'd really like to get into the ridiculous ranges) but good enough for an alternate build i can switch to for AV mowing.

trying it out with a gloom build, i can't seem to get any good results. clocking in at like 2:10-2:20, which is significantly slower. i took weaken resolve on this build too and it's faster in tests using it (procced w/ achilles) (gains about 10-15 in time). what's your setup in slotting on the string with shatter armor? maybe i'm missing something here.

i've been wondering about psi melee for awhile, because it's the first actual 50 i played up normally on homecoming. there's a certain weird factor to it that i think isn't properly captured in any tests where the nature of insight isn't necessarily about expending it immediately because it's a fixed time, but i always wondered what the actual performance is. the answer is... it's okay, i guess. with similar building, it averages out to around 2m flat for it's dps. the idea is that whenever you get insight, you expend it on regular attacks to it's maximum amount until the very last second, and then last greater psi blade hit at that point. while insight is locked out or not available then you get to keep using greater psiblade due to it's high DPA with a million procs on it that always activate. so, in my testing it's insight activate-> 8 attacks, GPB. then using GPB whenever it's up until insight comes back. i tried some strings where i added boggle to greatly increase the amount of uptime insight had, and it definitely did but it ended up with similar results to just kinda starting off with insight and letting things rock. it's unfortunate the psi melee has one of those cool factors like titan weapons where you have to pay attention to what you're doing for maximum output but the actual output itself leaves something to be desired.

I still would like to know if bruising is ever coming back since that's one of those flavor things that defines a tank from a brute conceptually (whereas a tank makes a team stronger and a brute is more 'selfish') that I'm sad to see go. Is there any reason why a revamped bruising (ie minor stacking -res on all attacks or nonstacking -res on all attacks thats allowed to stack between diff tanks) is off the table?

it's one of those things where having the pet out is really inconsistent in a live play situation, so it's not a realistic gauge of 'added damage' to me since they're very likely to die in AV/trial AOE situations and won't focus targets vs. bosses and whatnot in groups. i refined my gloom build some more, and ended up getting a 2:40 as my best time between like 3 tests - the big things are putting a decimation proc in gloom alongside changing out 2 of the lethal (glad's javelin and glad's net) for dam/mez hami-os on dominate. dominate does pretty fair damage and having followup boosting damage overall all the time means that it's affected more by the damage spikes from the aim+gaussian proc and the decimation proc on gloom. i think it's possible to reduce it more to maybe like a 2:30 range, but at the moment i'm pretty happy with this build since it's nice and snappy while also outputting sub 3m times. main thing i gotta look out for is how monstrous the endurance usage is. it's pretty ridiculous - if ageless goes down then the end bar just vanishes in like, two strings. also the build got the aoe hold back so theres more mitigation for it, which is just a nice bonus

hmm, a quick test run on a revamped fortunata build that sheds a lot of res (loses out on tough, effectively 22% res) but gains shatter armor and the spider blaster. with the blaster out and not dying, i got it down to roughly 1m55. using follow up->lunge->dominate (procced out)->shatter armor->followup->lunge->dominate as a string, aim whenever i can and psychic wail whenever i can. i'm really not sure if trying to use a procced out gloom would be better than having the spider blaster out and alive doing damage, but i kinda doubt it. it's still a pretty big difference. without the blaster it's back up to 3m though, so i'm betting without having to rely on the pet it's not really worth the sacrifice in -res. i also tried using a gloom string, but it's still in the 3m range. there's definitely gotta be a way to get this to sub 3m solo and no pets/hyrbid- just gotta figure out what i'm missing.

haha, it's definitely all relative. i never pyloned on live, so my standards are i25 specific and on the extreme outlier of bio armor scrapping. that PB time really makes me think i can do better on that fort, especially looking at that old thread about NW damage. fitting in shatter armor and a patron pet should really make the st damage skyrocket, i think?

the hell? i really wonder how that was managed. followup slash lunge? even with bio armors insane offensive boosts and the presence of crits/crit and strikes proc stuff like dual blades struggled to push below 2min without a good attack chain