siolfir

It's actually fairly common in farming situations; the influx of inspirations that can be converted to reds and popped to make room for more means pretty much every AT can hit the cap fairly easily as long as they can survive the aggro. Brutes have a bit further to go to hit the cap, but each one you pop until you get capped makes the next one come that much faster. Do I think that going from 775% to 700% is a huge issue? No more than I thought going from 850% to 775% was. Edit: the reported purpose behind the lowered cap was to put a capped Brute's damage below that of a capped Blaster or Scrapper when using the same scale attack: 7 * 0.75 is 5.25, 5 * 1.125 is 5.625; at the old cap a Brute would be at 5.8125.

So, with these changes in place in time for the stress test... ...if the test goes well, can we take the experimental tag off of the changes?

One less patch to go for the changes, so maybe they'll be in time for my birthday*. * - at the end of August

Just for reference, here are the relevant patch notes from the previous patch, with quick edits - note that this has not been checked against anything and my additions are in red: Tank Updates [Experimental Changes] Modifiers Tanker: Ranged damage modifier increased from 0.5 to 0.8, Melee damage modifier increased from 0.8 to 0.95 Tanker Self Damage Modifier (Controls Build Up) lowered from 1.00 to 0.75 (they still should do more damage than before due to higher base damage modifiers.) Bruise has been removed from T1 powers. Brute : Ranged and Melee damage modifiers are now equal. (note: both are 0.75) Epic Pools: All Brute and Tanker Epic pools now use ranged damage modifiers (note: this means no change in damage from Live for both ATs) Tanker damage cap increased to 500% (from 400%) Brute damage cap lowered to 700% (from 775%) Most Tanker Melee AoE powers have had their target caps increased. Most cones are now 10 target cap. Most PBAoE are now 16 target cap. Tanker now gets an inherent buff to the radius of AoE attacks and arc of cones. +50% for sphere attacks. +100% for cones Some powers are unaffected by this buff. This is noted on the power description. Brute Fury Generation Hitting AVs no longer gives bonus Fury, but Fury generation for attacking has been increased in a variety of ways. Brute Fury generation now takes into account the cast time of the attack for successful hits. Any attack slower than brawl will now generate bonus Fury if it lands a hit. Brutes now get bonus fury generation in teams, the larger the team, the larger the bonus. (still here, but reduced as of this patch) Fury now takes 10 seconds without attacking to start its accelerated decay, instead of 5 seconds. The goal of these changes is to improve Fury generation in teams when the Brute is not the only brute, or is in the company of another tanking AT. To help debug these changes, the combat spam now shows +Fury and -Fury numbers. Note that this is a temporary change and will be removed regardless if these changes remain or get rolled back. Gauntlet Is now applied via a global proc. Any single target power that takes accuracy enhancements will trigger an AoE taunt. Every AoE power that takes accuracy enhancements will taunt the enemies it hit. Radius is now the same for all attacks (10ft, 5 targets max) Taunt scale is now 10% higher than Brute's Brute PunchVoke is now also applied via a global proc. Any power that either inflicts damage or takes accuracy enhancements will be able to punch-voke.) Power Levels To improve Tanker AoE capability during level up progression, the following powers had their acquisition levels changed: Battle Axe > Whirling Axe = 20, Swoop = 28 Martial Arts > Dragon Tail = 20, Focus Chi = 28, Crippling Axe Kick = 34 Stone Melee> Tremor = 28, Hurl Boulder = 35 War Mace > Whirling Mace = 20, Clobber = 28 Taunt Auras Brute and Tanker Ice Armor powers no longer have built-in Taunt, they are now instead covered by the inherent global proc. The following Taunt Auras are now all scale 1 Taunt (approximately 13.6s at level 50): Invincibility Against All Odds Rise to the Challenge (Brute and Tank only) So is it too early to say "push it live" yet?

If it's not broken for Stalkers to have Assassin's Focus backing Assassin's Strike, it's not broken for Energy Transfer to do less damage (scale 4.56 vs scale 5) in the same animation time (1 sec) that also does self-damage, meaning the more often that you use it the more you suffer the penalty. I was one of the people who argued against it being nerfed before the Stalker buffs because of the lack of AoE in the set (particularly for Stalkers, who didn't even get the "meh" that is Whirling Hands), and it just makes even less sense after essentially giving ET to every Stalker was the "fix" chosen for an entire AT. The worst case scenario is that another melee set might compete with Titan Weapons for single target damage while still falling far behind on AoE.

I agree with this for the most part, but I could see deliberately skipping Titan Weapons. It probably doesn't need any help. It would certainly make my (primarily melee) Fortunata happier.

My complaint about it has to do with how it affects the tabs when viewing character information. I used to be able to see if there was a description, and if there wasn't one, it would go to powers. I liked that - if you took the time to write something, I got to see what you wrote, but if you didn't then I could see what I was probably looking for in the first place (your powersets, so I could adjust my teaming expectations). I'd be fine with it if it was at the bottom of the Powers tab, and the initial tab opened used the same selection process that I described earlier; I'd overlook it like I tend to skim set bonuses just to notice if they're present or not (wall of text set bonuses mean I'm fine if the team splits and everybody does their own thing; no set bonuses means I'm going to suggest everybody stay together).

I'll just leave this here...

I want Car Melee, where you swing the car around. You get more damage out of it that way than by throwing it, where it starts losing momentum as soon as you let go.

No, I slot an attuned Celerity: Stealth.

It doesn't come up much because usually if you want to invest that heavily into a power, you take it before level 49. You notice it more with respecs at lower levels - like having Mind Link 4-slotted at the forced level 24 Widow respec.

For a melee AT in this game, that's technical.

And the effect of those powers was theoretically balanced around the amount of threat, so an increase in the amount of threat would disproportionately affect the powersets that use those powers as a significant portion of their mitigation, while not decreasing the relative mitigation of sets that do not change defense/resistance/regeneration values or offensive buffs (to-hit/damage) of powersets based on the number of enemies around you. That's the part you're ignoring.

So I guess this means I'm giving the next generation everything?

The crap enhancements are bought attuned and converted, where they are either used or resold. So even the crap sells.

The original developers not only felt that an implicit penalty was enough, they also have many powers - both offensive and defensive - scale based on the number of mobs around you specifically to reduce that implicit penalty or increase their effectiveness due to the greater inherent risk. This proposal seems to ignore and/or overlook those, based on a premise that "too many mobs around you" is the problem, and really just shifts priorities to extra AoE burst damage to trim the fat. Guess what? Everybody already has AoE burst with Incarnates.

Yes, my Banished Pantheon Ravagers need all the help from Ageless that they can get.

I linked to the same post and acknowledged that it was different than my expectations based on live. I haven't downloaded the source code to check and see if the limit is 25% via code (I'm lazy) or if there was a change made by the SCORE team, but I'm willing to accept that it was checked before posting.

It avoids child custody battles in the future.

You could try the pylon thread, early on Kaeladin was posting his "general PvE" build that was getting between 500-700 DPS, which is far more than enough. I didn't dig in deeper for others, but I think there was another post that was getting around 800? Sure, a Pylon isn't a great survival test, but Bio isn't really hurting with some set bonuses and if you're killing that fast, you only need to live for around a minute or less for most AVs: I'm pretty sure the Absorb will cover you that long.