kenlon

No, I just disagree with you on whether having Domination up all the time is bad. Frankly, Dominators should have just had the mez resist and mag increase baked into their base powersets, rather than having it dependent on a clickie. But if it's going to be on a click power, then that power should not have a situation where having 122% global recharge leaves you with a thirty second plus downtime, and 123% means no downtime ever.

Very much agreed. Fighting has three powers that are very quick, with recharge times that are almost *too* low in the endgame. Might be good to make Leaping a set that gives you slower recharging, harder hitting attacks, since that's what Spring Attack is by default. Not sure what the numbers should look like, though.

Fortunately, ideas like this are going to go nowhere, since the devs have more than demonstrated that they were paying attention during Econ 101. For which we should all be profoundly grateful.

I would have to disagree - the problem is not with the ability to permanently have up Domination, but with the gap in-between perma and not-quite-perma.

Small bug report - the value in the DB for tanker Maneuvers appears to be off. It's 2.28% base in Mid's and 2.63 base in game.

Gah, double post.

This is actually no longer true. With the rework of the Fighting pool and the stacking synergies, taking Boxing, Kick and Cross Punch is a very good deal for some builds.

You do still need the +to-hit to get bonus damage on fast snipe, though. Nothing changed for people who had the old fast-snipe builds, but people who were short of that got a usable in-combat attack instead of only an opener. The parallel to my "Just make it a normal click buff" is very relevant, and I can't believe I didn't think of it before.

You have not asked any question for me to answer. "Stop asking me things that make me look bad when I can't answer!" is not actually a question. 😛 I'm perfectly willing to listen to any argument as to why having Domination work differently than every other power in the game is a good thing - I will almost certainly not agree, but I would at least think that you had some reason for wanting it.

You're dodging my question. What reason, other than FYGMism, do you have for opposing Domination working like other long duration/longer cooldown buffs in the game?

If you're trying to address the balance of a game, then yes, fairness and things working as the player has been led to expect from every other AT in the game should matter. How would it harm you if other people could get smoother scaling uptime on Domination based on how much recharge they have?

I did actually see you mention it elsewhere, but I was too lazy. 😄

My last build was centered around making a soft-capped tank that wouldn't need the Fighting pool for anything. I managed it. The problem is, the psi hole I ended up with is really, really annoying, so it's time to invest a pile of inf into making him a build that addresses that. And I get AlmostPermaHasten, too, which is nice. With one mob in Invincibility, I have defense numbers of: 45.9% S/L 46.5% F/C 44.7% E/N 22.9% Psi 28.6% Melee 24.2% Ranged 25.1% AoE And my resists, with no procs going: 90.09% S/L 69.3% F/C 44.1% E/N 54.3% Toxic - 48.3 in Mid's 43% Psi - 37% in Mid's. This is because Mid's won't allow me to allocate a sixth slot to Ball Lightning, thus preventing me from actually having the Ragnarock 6-slot bonus in the builder, but there's an unallocated slot. I'm not entirely happy about the weaker E/N resists, but I've not found a slotting that addresses it well without losing out on the Psi survivability that is the point of this build. General things: Hasten has a 130s cooldown - I haven't done the math, but as long as I smack Ageless on cooldown, it should be up all the time. I slapped Hecatomb in Total Focus as opposed to another attack because I want to use the proc to help shore it up into being less terrible, because I want to actually use the power, not skip it. Anyone have input? Did I miss anything obvious in my slotting? I've been tweaking and moving slots around, mostly in my defense powers, so I may have missed something and more sets of eyes would be helpful.

So, effectively, "I had to deal with this, so everyone else should too", then? Disappointing. Is it fair that the 1% global recharge between 122 and 123 makes a drastically difference in effectiveness than any increase of a single point previously?

No one's been attacking you, or the AT. No one 'dissed' the psi Epic pool, it was just noted that high damage Sentinels use the epic, not their AT powersets, as a large portion of their damage. Do you feel that Sentinels, as an AT, are well balanced when it comes to damage output? Do they compare decently with Scrappers?

That would be great, but I would recommend not holding your breath - there's a lot of indications that things around sidedness are really, really full of nasty technical debt that would need to be addressed before we get that.

The overperformance is in comparison to other melee sets, regardless of how they're enhanced. Titan Weapons breaks the formulas that (AFAIK) every other attack set in the game follows. @Galaxy Brain did a really great write up of it in one of the beta patch discussion threads, but I can't seem to find it now.

You seem to have missed the other question I asked you, so here it is again: Would turning Domination into a standard click power with 90s duration and 200s recharge, without the need to fill a bar, address your problem with removing the effectiveness cliff? (At least in principle.)

In the case of the Domination thread, because finding a way to make PermaDom and NotQuitePermaDom closer in effectiveness would be good for Dominators, and isn't a large change. The AH stuff is, I think, an outgrowth of people seeing the no more double inf for exemping change and completely failing to understand how that impacts the economy and their effective income. And for this thread, well, I've had some discussions in game that included Abysmalyxia, and I think he may have green skin and be taking Superadine. . . 😄(This is assuming that he's the guy with that global chat name, of course.) Though, amusingly, in a vacuum I would agree that Hasten is bad game design. But it's baked into the balance assumptions of CoH at a level where removing it would require reworking a ton of things from the ground up, if you don't want to make players feel like they've been nerfed into the ground. Now, changes like that have been made before, and are sometimes needed (Enhancement Diversity being the canon example), but Hasten doesn't distort balance to the point that there's no good option but to remove it.

No, the problem that GalaxyBrain, Replacement, and I have all expressed is: "Domination has a problem because the gulf between 122% global recharge and 123% global recharge is huge in terms of Domination uptime." It's out of line with everything else in the game, and is out in line in such a way that limits build diversity (because you can't have AlmostAllOfTheTimeDom.) On my tanker builds, for example, I almost always end up with not-quite-permahasten, with an effective 130-140 second recharge, because I choose to prioritize other things over squeezing out that last bit of recharge. If Hasten worked like Domination, where you had an enforced 30+ second downtime if you don't make the power permanent, then these builds would be a waste. The only way that Permadom is too good is this: "PermaDom is too good in comparison to being 1% recharge short of PermaDom." I don't have any issue whatsoever with Permadom. (I think that there are some core design flaws around putting Dominator's ability to reliably use controls behind a click power, but that's beside the point.) Other AT's do not have built-in "You must be this much +recharge to ride this ride" signs in the same way that Dominators do. I see no reason that Dominator players should be punished for not having a certain level of +recharge. I'll ask you the same question I asked Salty: Would turning Domination into a standard click power with 90s duration and 200s recharge, without the need to fill a bar, address your problem with removing the effectiveness cliff? (At least in principle.) And this is easy enough to test: How long does it take for you to fill your bar the first time? If this change was being considered for real, then one of the things that would absolutely come up in testing is how long that takes and whether it needs to be adjusted.

Since I first noticed it with Fighting, I'm seeing that there are lots of other places sprinkled around various sets that this shows up as well. I know a lot of the code for CoH is best classified as "crawling horror", but this would be a really nice change to get made.

If you are 1% short of recharge to perma, say, Carrion Creepers, do you suddenly have an extended downtime on the power? And you still aren't replying to my other question. If Domination were to be changed so that you didn't need to fill a bar to activate it, and it was just a 90s buff on a 200s cooldown, which would leave Permadom builds entirely unchanged while greatly smoothing out the experience for players who don't have Permadom, would that address your objections?

This is something that I especially noticed in the Fighting pool, since with the synergy changes, they're actually worth considering now. Checking the info and seeing "Special smashing damage on target" instead of a damage number, and then having to go look up what damage it should do for your AT and add the appropriate percentage buff is really pretty annoying. Is there any chance this could get addressed, or is there a reason the UI can't deal with the power expressions?

. . . you are dodging the question. Again. I can tell you the answer, though. Less recharge = less damage in a reasonably linear manner. If you lose enough recharge that you have 0.1 seconds of dead time, the loss of damage is going to be half of what you get for a 0.2 second dead time, and so on. (Yes, there is an edge case around powers that provide short term buffs, but that does not disprove the general case.) Would you agree with that? Reposting this, since I think you missed it earlier, and I'm interested in your thoughts.

Okay, you're skipping the actual question I was asking. Is the loss in damage linear based on the amount of recharge you are short or not? The Tar Patch fix was due to them changing the backend of the game so that powers can spawn other powers directly, allowing them to have them use the proper AT modifiers directly instead of needing to make a whole pile of pseudopets for different ATs. See this for confirmation: Having ATs actually use their AT modifiers, and then balancing the sets if needed from there is far better than keeping things buggy and less maintainable to preserve bugs that some players like. We'll have to agree to disagree over the Rage -Def crash fix, because I've not found it to be crippling, though it is something I have to pay attention to. Tanker changes. Mastermind AI. Asymmetrical Costume Editor changes. Origin power pools. Combat log fixes so it's actually consistent. Electrical Affinity. New, and useful, IO sets. Addressed inflation *before* the economy gets broken. I'm not sure what changes they didn't implement that you're unhappy about, but they've done an excellent job. These are just the things that I could think off off the top of my head, because they've affected my play. Thunderspy, from what I've seen in patch notes, has a much more devil-may-care attitude towards radically altering the game. I'm perfectly happen with them being out there, but I wouldn't want to play there.