Sarrate

You phrased that sentence as "you can mitigate the crash by stacking it for 10s and using the proc." While it's true, you can make the crash feel less bad, what I was trying to say is stacking it - at all - is a damage loss in the long run. So, I guess it depends on what you meant by "mitigate the crash."

I sometimes wonder what the game would be like if status protection (for armored characters) was less absolute, but enemies with status effects were less prevalent. An AV knocking an armored character across the room from time to time? Not a problem, even super tough heroes like Superman and Hulk aren't perfectly planted. However, getting ping ponged repeatedly by a handful of thugs with guns? Much less so. I say this because I think there could've been more variety and flavor in a game balanced like that. Now, however, any moderately common status effect that isn't protected against by an armor set is seen as a huge deficiency. At least now you can mitigate 90% of all knockbacks with 3 IOs starting at lvl 7 (Steadfast's min, I think). Much better than having to clog up 1 pool & 3 power picks for Acrobatics - and only at lvl22 (you are taking Stamina at 20, right? :P). I know that ship has long since sailed, so I'm just musing out loud. Trying to change something that fundamental at this point would surely have a lot of unintended consequences.

I think you're mistaken on the last bullet - in the long run, Rage's 10s damage debuff outweighs any advantages of stacking Rage: Current Rage – Zero Stacking Dmg Rage+Dmg RageProc Duration DmgOverDur 1.95 0.8 0 120 330 0.1 0 0 10 1 TotalDmg: 331 Proposed Rage – Zero Stacking Dmg Rage+Dmg RageProc Duration DmgOverDur 1.95 0.4 0.4 120 330 0.1 0 0 10 1 TotalDmg: 331 Proposed Rage – 10s Stack Dmg Rage+Dmg RageProc Duration DmgOverDur 1.95 0.4 0.4 110 302.5 0.1 0 0.4 10 5 TotalDmg: 307.5 Current Rage – 10s Stack Dmg Rage+Dmg RageProc Duration DmgOverDur 1.95 0.8 0 110 302.5 0.1 0 0 10 1 TotalDmg: 303.5 Current Rage – 50s Stack Dmg Rage+Dmg RageProc Duration DmgOverDur 1.95 1.6 0 50 177.5 0.1 0 0 10 1 TotalDmg: 178.5 Proposed Rage - 50s Stack Dmg Rage+Dmg RageProc Duration DmgOverDur 1.95 0.8 0.4 50 157.5 0.1 0 0.4 10 5 TotalDmg: 162.5 You have to keep in mind that during those 10s you're losing out on not just base damage, but all enhancements, and any other damage buffs (from a team, lore pets, inspirations, etc). The more you stack, the larger a percent of your time you're in a debuffed state (perma double stack it's 10 / 60 = 16.667% of the time). It gives extremely strong burst damage, however. Additionally, you'll probably use attacks differently during the debuff windows - you may hold off on firing KO Blow until after the window, or (using your example) use Jab to mitigate it. It gets a little more complicated, however, if you consider other powers to get around the debuff (Sands of Mu, Judgement, etc). Note: I have nothing against Rage's crash. It's an incredibly powerful ability and I think the crash on it is justified. I think removing the crash could just lead to less flavor and more power creep. I say that completely understanding why people hate it.

MoG was a completely different power back then. It provided massive +def / +res to all but psi (as it does now), but for 3 minutes and dropped your health to 10%. Finally, it eliminated all healing & regen. A few things to consider, there was no 45% soft cap back then, higher level and rank enemies had +tohit, not +accuracy. So it was feasible that enemies could overcome the defense in it. I cannot remember if Scrappers had a 90% or 75% res cap back then, but either way, the healing penalty was brutal. Consider: 10% hp at 90% res = 100% hp at 0% res 10% hp at 75% res = 40% hp at 0% res MoG either turned you into an Eluding SR that couldn't heal (SR didn't have scaling resists), or it made you an Eluding SR at 40% hp that couldn't heal. It also made you susceptible to psi (no def/res, so you basically were naked at 10% hp vs it). It was strong for short durations, but you could easily get whittled down and had no way to get out of MoG aside from death or waiting on the clock.

Looks like the only reason you died is because you forgot to turn Evasion back on after stealthing. Even then, you lasted over 20 seconds at the cyst. Hmm, maybe you should monitor AoE defense instead of Melee to catch that?

I have two thoughts, one more off the cuff, the other is more of a question/discussion. 1) Armor T9s (off the cuff) At lower levels, these are less desirable because their longer recharge makes them fairly unreliable. When recharge starts getting to the point where they're up more reliably, then it's more likely that other factors are going to start having a larger impact on survivability (IOs, Incarnates, etc). What if instead of clicks, the T9s were instead time limited toggles. For example, Unstoppable was a 0 end cost toggle that lasted 180 seconds. It would still crash, but instead of a click, the player could detoggle it when convenient rather than face the conundrum of "I have enough time left on Unstoppable that I don't want to wait, but not enough that I really want to jump into the next spawn." As a toggle, the player could simply detoggle it, deal with the consequences, and move on. Additionally, as a toggle, it would prevent it from ever being made perma, as its recharge wouldn't start until it was toggled off. So instead of a 1,000 second (16.667 minute) cooldown to prevent it from being made permanent (by 20 seconds), that reducing its uptime to the same amount would only require a 100 second cooldown (100 / 5 = 20s). One potential problem of this is if you wanted to lower the baseline uptime, you'd also be reducing the maximum uptime (unless there was some way to have a split of enhanceable & unenhanceable recharge or some other shenanigans). Is it a good idea? I honestly don't know, but it was just a thought I had. (I know back on live, Arcanaville had also floated the idea that T9s could have soft crashes instead of hard crashes. For example, a ramping up +end cost the longer T9s were active, so after a certain point, you'd have to disable them, as you couldn't afford to keep them up.) 2) What are/should we balance for? (question / discussion) This is something I've been thinking about since reading the ever feel useless (support woes) thread. What is the balancing point we should keep in mind for our suggestions? I ask because, yes, crashing nukes were of fairly dubious value, so making them crashless is obviously a win in terms of usability, but it comes as the cost of increasing damage throughput. Likewise, snipes weren't very useful because they did low damage over time, so they were made insta-cast, making them "instant"ly more desirable. Again, this increased damage output. Or recent attempts to make more single target sets have more AoE (Dark Melee with the Shadow Maul and (shelved, iirc?) Dark Consumption change). It's not just damage, either, but defenses as well, for example how radically easier it is to stack resist set bonuses than it was on live. Or Incarnate abilities being obtainable by doing regular content, etc, etc. Do I think any one of these changes was bad, per se? Not really, having a lemon power in your set really sucks. Having to do content you don't like or isn't accessible for you for some reason (schedule doesn't line up with when people are doing Incarnate Trials) is likewise a complete bummer. However, the combination of these factors are leading to power creep that's having an effect on what sets / ATs are viewed as desirable. I guess what I'm driving at is depending upon where balance is important, we should be careful about what we ask for, as those changes could have some wide reaching unintended consequences. (Yes, this is also true for the idea above.)

Don't sigh too soon... I mean, beating it with a Stalker is still up for grabs. 🙃

I remembered the damage cap was lowered, but I couldn't remember to what value. Instead of testing it, I dug it out of the patch notes. The notes say: I took that to mean that their damage cap was now +700% (800% total), not +600% (700% total). So, the numbers in my above post were in error... oh geeze, I think I found a number of mistakes. Gosh. Alright, so I need to rectify this failing. Have a table: Brute Scrapper (minion) Scrapper (non-minion) Extra +Dmg Base 0.75 1.125 1.125 Fury 1.8 0 0 Crit 1 1.05 1.1 Cap 7 5 5 Enh 0.95 0.95 0.95 Scale 2.8125 2.3034375 2.413125 0 Scale 3 2.59875 2.7225 0.25 Scale 3.1875 2.8940625 3.031875 0.5 Scale 3.375 3.189375 3.34125 0.75 Scale 3.5625 3.4846875 3.650625 1 Scale 3.75 3.78 3.96 1.25 Scale 3.9375 4.0753125 4.269375 1.5 Scale 4.125 4.370625 4.57875 1.75 Scale 4.3125 4.6659375 4.888125 2 Scale 4.5 4.96125 5.1975 2.25 Scale 4.6875 5.2565625 5.506875 2.5 Scale 4.875 5.551875 5.81625 2.75 Scale 5.0625 5.8471875 6.125625 3 Scale 5.25 5.90625 6.1875 3.25 Scale 5.25 5.90625 6.1875 3.5

You could make it more rewarding to use when you're not in the best condition, sure. My argument is that its mechanics are counter productive to how Regen operates. It would work far better for a set that has more preventative mitigation and could survive at lower health for longer periods of time. (You could pair it with MoG, but that has a long enough cooldown that you couldn't leverage it all the time.) Fair. Given that pretty much player heals I can think of (discounting things like Unstoppable's full heal before the crash) are based off base hp, I just figured that's how the heal would work. Also a fair point. The idea of having to spend more time spamming heals and not attacking doesn't sound like an enjoyable playstyle. I understand that you're basically trying to balance throughput to activation time. If you tune it too weakly, then it's not going to be worth the time trying to cast it / by the time you cast the heal, you're already taken damage and are behind on the curve. If you tune it too high, then you still run into the immortality dilemma, except it could be asking the player "if you want to win this fight, you have to stop clicking this button, when you do, though, you die." There is still a maximum throughput it can sustain, and even when near infinite, you can still be killed. I was watching a couple older videos I made fighting against even-level Brutes in the Storm Palace on my BS/Regen. There were times where lost 50%+ of my health in seconds. If I was at lower health I would've been instantly gibbed. (Something that happened to me more than once before I succeeded.) It doesn't matter how high your regen is, or how fast you can heal, if you can't absorb the damage first, your face is going to meet the floor. I still don't understand your viewpoint. Is there a threshold where a set has a lock on a certain mechanic or combination of mechanics? If so, what is it? From what I can tell, Bio has resistance, defense, regen, recovery, heals, absorbs, stances, scalable buffs, damage aura, resistance debuffs, regen debuffs, and damage debuffs. I mean, what doesn't Bio Armor have? I could even argue that its res/def split is similar to WP (s/l res, elemental defense). Or what about Electric Armor vs Radiation Armor? Talk about sets that are similar. Both are resistance based, both have higher energy resistance than the others, both have a click heal, both have additional regen. Even with those similarities, they play differently due to Elec's damage aura, end drain, and endurance recovery compared to Rad's absorb, +recharge, and non-crashing T9 (not to mention Ground Zero, which I haven't tried, yet). Simply adding Absorb in no way would step on Bio's toes - especially if it was done in a different way (like smaller, stacking absorbs from toggles/passives, or some other mechanism).

I feel like I over comment in Regen threads, so I didn't post in this thread when it originally popped up. However, now that it has Revived itself, my Resilience is gone and here we are. Before I comment on the suggestions, I want to flesh out my view of the set and what I see as its problems, as it will permeate throughout. Regen's weaknesses are as follows: * Unlike defense & resistance, healing and regeneration do not scale with incoming damage, it's fixed. * Due to very limited mitigation and needing to take damage before you can healing/regen, Regen is very susceptible to burst damage. The lower a Regen's health, the more susceptible they are to this. (eg: at full, MaxHP capped health, they can eat boss attacks, at low hp, minions could do enough damage to kill a Regen). * Dull Pain can't be relied upon as a heal, as its +MaxHP is more valuable than (more hp to soak damage, higher hp/sec regen). Instant Healing is a poor button to press when low on health because if you're already low on health, burst damage could kill you before the regen takes you out of the danger zone. That leaves Reconstruction (good) and MoG (long cooldown). For a set reliant on clicks to save it, it doesn't have that many reliable ones. * Due to the above, it means that Regen being able to respond to damage quickly is very important. This creates friction with sets that have either longer animations (can get locked out of healing) or sets without any mitigation (would you consider playing a Fire/Regen?). * Lastly, because it has so much active mitigation, it means it steals time that could be otherwise used for other things (damage) for very little benefit. Okay, with that said... I understand where you're going with this, but I feel like this would be a trap that would get Regen characters killed. The lower their health is, the more at risk they are of getting insta-gibbed by a high damage attack. When you're low on life, you need to get out of that situation quickly. Taking the time to press a click for +damage prior to healing yourself is intentionally putting yourself at risk. This is the big one I wanted to comment on. Again, I understand where you're coming from, but I think it's misguided. One of Regen's faults right now is the fact it eats up a lot of animation time for the lack luster survivability it already provides. Swapping out a 90s duration click for something spammable feels like a step in the opposite direction. Furthermore, the healing you're suggesting isn't even that great. Let's take Instant Healing as it is now, 200% enhancable regen and 600% unenhancable regen for 90 seconds. Since regen scales linearly, we can compute how much health it would regenerate over 90 seconds. Unslotted: 800% / 240 = 3.333% hp/sec 3.333% hp/sec * 90 sec = 300% hp Slotted: 1000% / 240 = 4.167% hp/sec 4.167% hp/sec * 90 sec = 375% hp, HP Capped (using Scrapper numbers, just multiply the above by the appropriate cap) Unslotted: 6% hp / sec OR 540% base hp bars Slotted: 7.5% hp / sec OR 675% base hp bars I scaled everything to base HP because regen, unlike healing, scales with MaxHP. The higher your max hp, the more hp/sec you regenerate. Even at its worst (unslotted, no max hp), IH would be equivalent to spamming your proposed, and slotted IH once every 3 seconds (assuming a 1s activation). At worst (IH slotted, at the Scrapper HP cap) it would require you to use 75% of your active time just healing for a full 90 seconds (so 60s out of 90s). Additionally, it would be a weak "oh crap button" (not that IH is particularly strong as it is) because it would take a while to propel you out of the danger zone of where you could be insta-gibbed. To be most effectively, it should be used proactively to keep your hp high so you don't drop as low. Finally, a spammable, 0 cooldown power would probably be less effective than you'd like because of power queuing and the internal server ticks (aka: the source of Arcanatime). Just because a power has 0 cooldown doesn't mean you'd be able activate it the very next server tick. It might take an additional tick for the server to activate, lowering its throughput. (This is speculation, but a valid concern, I think.) So I'm absolutely not a fan of the power, as described. It would be more effective as basically a modified version of Hibernate or "combat Rest" (+regen only, cannot attack, can move, no max duration, low cooldown). I feel like this is a misguided view. Super Reflexes shtick is defense, why'd it get scaling resists? Why did Elec have Conserve Power changed to Energize (heal/regen)? It's supposed to be about resistance! It's because leaning to heavily in any one area makes a set brittle. It's why newer sets tend to be more layered compared to their closest analogues (Shield vs SR, Willpower vs Regen, etc). I feel Regen needs a way to mitigate damage, in one form or another, and I don't see why I can't be done without giving up its flavor. There is no reason why +Absorb cannot be Regen themed and there are any number of ways to add it (large absorbs existing clicks, smaller absorbs into toggles/passives, potentially stacking, etc). Shoot, modify Reconstruction so that it gives +resist to all instead of just toxic (could be strong and short, or long and milder, maybe it stacks, maybe it doesn't) and say that the newly healed wound is still regenerating and isn't as easily damaged. Or heck, if you really want to be crazy, give it a very short duration (5s?) intangible that you could attack through like Carnie Illusionists. To address the time spend clicking things, maybe all clicks give a +dmg buff of varying power/duration. To address issues with Regen being gibbed while animation locked, you could perhaps make some of the clicks usable while using another power (this might not be supported by the engine). There are a lot of ways to grow the set that still feels like regen without being completely focused on a single mechanic. I feel like I'm absolutely dumping on your idea, and I'm sorry about that. I'm not trying to be a jerk, I just have - uhmm - a lot of thoughts and a strong opinion on the matter. I also tried to flesh out my thoughts as much as I could so that at least you understand why I disagree with your idea. I see your T1 Revive and raise you Fast Healing giving two powers (Fast Healing and Revive), kind of like other powers that work that way (Kheldian Forms, Swap Ammo, etc). Another thought, instead of Revive bringing you back from the dead, it is a passive cheat death that prevents you from dying with a longish cooldown. (Again, I don't know if it's possible by the engine, but it's how I'd imagine Presence/Unrelenting works, though I've never tested it myself.) (Aside: I'm so glad I copied and pasted this into Notepad. Forum just tried to eat it. Not this time, buddy! 😠)

That got a literal "hah!" out of me. :) Alright, fair enough, sir, fair enough...

That was a fascinating read, Luminara. It's one thing to know that people see the game differently, but getting such a vivid look is a such a different thing. I confess that your requirements are completely foreign to me, but I can understand your rationale behind them. However, one comment: I have no proof of this, but I've certainly never felt like I slowed down at the apex of a Super Jump. I always assumed that the forward vector was always a fixed magnitude and the upward vector just transitioned to zero after reaching a certain height. If you let go of the forward key, forward momentum actually slows down. I suppose this shouldn't be too hard to test, time jumping across a large zone while (1) bunny hopping with Super Jump and (2) max height Super Jumps. If the times weren't within the same ballpack, I'd be pretty surprised. Super Jump is probably my favorite all round travel power. Fast, easy to use, has vertical, can be used indoors (bunny hopping!), and Combat Jumping is still great (even if travel powers don't have prerequisites anymore.) It also has the optional mini-game of "the floor is lava! cross the zone without touching the ground!" going for it... I'm going to have to go ahead and /jranger this whole post... with incriminating evidence.

Even without the AT IO, it was cutting it pretty close, even on Live: Pre-Page 4: Brute: 0.75 * 8.75 = 6.5625 Scrapper (minion): 1.125 * 5 * 1.05 = 5.90625 (Brutes match at +687.5% dmg) Scrapper (non-minion): 1.125 * 5 * 1.1 = 6.1875 (Brutes match at +725% dmg) Post Page 4: Brute: 0.75 * 8 = 6 Scrapper (minion): 1.125 * 5 * 1.05 = 5.90625 (Brutes match at +687.5% dmg, so 12.5% shy of the cap) Scrapper (non-minion): 1.125 * 5 * 1.1 = 6.1875 (Brutes match at +725% dmg, impossible due to their lowered dmg cap) I was going to say that Scrapper damage is spikier (due to crits and smaller amounts of +dmg having a bigger effect on their damage), but Brutes also have to contend with the more variable nature of Fury (not an issue if they're tanking / in the thick of it, but if mobs are just getting deleted before they can build it up, maybe... I haven't played in high level teams to know that).

I'm almost positive shivan attacks apply -def, not -res like all normal Rad Blast / Melee attacks. [edit: Immediately upon posting I realized I worded that poorly... let me try again: I'm almost positive shivan attacks apply -def (like all player Rad Blast / Melee attacks), not -res.]

Gotcha. I guess that doesn't surprise me. I tended to design my builds to be exemplar friendly (preferring to use 30-33 IOs vs 50s, or lvl10s for things like Steadfast), but I never actually went and measured / tested things. That's very unintuitive! I hear you. It's a lot easier to do when you play / post a lot, but I know I'm a lot more reserved about posting things these days because I'm not as in the loop with the current state of things. Thanks for the clarification, gives me interesting things to ponder... /wanders off to Mids

Was that a change later in the game's life (either close to the snap or Homecoming specific)? Back on Live I always thought set bonuses were lost when exemplared low enough to lose the power... Um, have I been mistaken about that this whole time...? 🤨

I understand your reasoning with absorption, but if it were me, I'd put it on Reconstruction rather than Dull Pain for a few reasons: * Dull Pain has a long cooldown and won't be up very often. Even with capped recharge (+400%), you're looking at a cooldown of 72 seconds. * Dull Pain's biggest boost is its +MaxHP, as that already increases Regen's ability to soak damage and increases the effectiveness of +regen. It's going to be more important to keep DP up than postponing its use and wasting its absorb. * Reconstruction is up far more often, and already has issues (use it too early and you waste the heal, use it too late and you risk getting gibbed). If Recon was completely switched over to an absorb (for example) it could be used at any health level and even be used to help soften alpha strikes. Note: Between Accolades and DP, Stalkers and Scrappers can already cap HP. So the +MaxHP change would only benefit Brute. (I don't know about Sentinels, and their Regen is already different than the rest, anyways.)

As I remember (and it's been a while) it used to function very well across multiple monitors - or more generally - wide aspect ratios. As the game's display was made wider, it would have a wider and wider field of view (fov). The problem arose after PvP was added to the game when it was realized that the wider fov gave a tactical advantage, as players with wide aspect ratios / multiple monitors could see things that other players couldn't and it was deemed unfair. After that, the way the game scales at wider aspects was changed. I can't remember if it just stretched or if the horizontal fov was fixed, and making the window wider decreased the vertical fov to maintain the same aspect ratio. That's hearsay from what I remember, I didn't experience it myself, and I haven't tested it myself on Homecoming. This also may not be a factor with the Godzilla setup above, as the aspect ratio would still be pretty close to a normal display, just using more pixels. That being said, there would be two main ways to play across multiple monitors. One would be to play windowed and have it stretched across multiple monitors. The second would be to use a "surround" (Nvidia) or "eyefinity" (AMD) setup. Basically merging multiple discrete monitors so the OS only sees a single display. This would allow playing in fullscreen (borderless or exclusive) across multiple monitors. There is one caveat to this. Since Windows would only see a single monitor, it means that when you fullscreen something (like a browser) it would be stretched across all monitors. Likewise, when utilizing the snap (left, right, and quadrants). You could toggle it on/off between gaming sessions, but that's pretty tedious. I ran with a 3x1080p setup for a while, but I eventually stopped because super wide aspect ratios weren't well supported and the normal desktop use case was pretty bad. Right now I use a 1440p 144hz monitor as my primary and 2x1080p 60hz monitors (one on each side).

The problem with that approach is twofold. First, Regen already has a +MaxHP power, Dull Pain. Second, MaxHP has a cap which varies from AT to AT. On a Scrapper, it's around +80% MaxHP. That's trivial to reach for Regen, Dull Pain (60%) and Accolades (20%) get you there. Brutes have some room to grow (cap at +114%), and I'm not sure about Sentinels (I'm guessing their hp cap is fairly low). Either way, even for Brutes, the caps aren't high enough to have +MaxHP make a meaningful difference.

240 / (DarkRegenRecharge + DarkRegenActivation) = Regen (where 1.0 = 100%) So if Dark Regen had a 10 sec recharge: 240 / (10 + 1.17) = 21.48 = 2,148% regen Explanation: It takes 240 seconds to go from 1 hp to full. So dividing that by the duration you want to heal to full in will give you the required regen amount. Practically, Dark Regen won't heal quite that much (you have to fire it early to account for reaction times, activation time, etc so it'll overheal). Theoretically, however, it takes an absurd amount of regen to match.

Aside from a way of sidestepping regen resistance (using periodic heals that scale off current max hp rather than fixed off base hp), I really don't see changing the tick rate as being beneficial. Regeneration causes players to gain 5% of their hp every 12 seconds (240 sec to go from 1 to full). With just Health, Fast Healing, and Integration 3 slotted with SOs (559% total regen) that drops the tick period down to 2.1 seconds (12 / 5.59). Honestly, healing that 5% health smoothly over 2.1 seconds or all at once is completely immaterial to Regen's problems. If it's going to die, regenerating 4.8% health in 2 sec or 5% health at 2.1 sec isn't going to make the difference. I'd rather not just make changes for cosmetic reasons without addressing a core problem, and that's dying to burst damage.

It may be more than I asked, but still very interesting, nonetheless! And you're quite right about it being a different kind of challenge (aside from others soloing TFs) and most fights have to be boring or probability will eventually roll against you. It's one reason I could never get into the various "Hardcore" modes in games (self imposed or otherwise). Losing all your progress because of one bad encounter? Yeesh. I salute those who do it, but I can't stomach it. @Werner, you just broke my mind. Attempting all these crazy difficult challenge and you haven't even gotten the +max hp accolade(s)? Geeze. 😛 Sounds like you'll be busy for a while. I'll be interested on hearing how your new builds fare. (I'm never one to absolutely maximize a build down a certain axis. I normally get "good enough" while also making it well rounded. Not being able to exemplar without being a dud is almost always a non-starter for me. Back on Live I even tried to build with lvl30-33 IOs to keep set bonuses as long as possible without also gimping their enhancement value. Attuned IOs make things so much simpler.)

A little bit of a tangent, but I personally find the ablative bar to be pretty difficult to see. Ideally, there would be another bar or - even better - some decoration on the border of the life bar to make it very clear where the ablative is. I understand the difficulty in changing the code, so I'm not holding my breath, but I never liked the ablative coloration. Wait, seriously? Absorbs scale with your current max hp, not base? That seems broken. I'm not saying broken as necessarily "unbalanced," but more "unexpected. As far as I'm aware, all player based heals heal for a flat amount. This includes self heals (Healing Flames) as well as healing others (Cauterize). It doesn't matter if the caster or the recipient's max hp is raised or lowered, the heals are always constant. I figured that they could operate off a percent (see NPCs like the tower repairmen and Immuno Surgeons (sp?)), but were intentionally not made to scale. Very strange.

Congratulations! I can't say I've played those arcs personally (I had stopped playing before shutdown), so I don't have any first hand experience with it... but given the kind of crazy hijinks you fought through and to have bested you in the past, I can extrapolate pretty far. How many attempts did it take? Also, now that you've completed your goal, what's the next goal on the horizon? I see what you did there, sir.

This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but I think making major changes to them (either in recharge or turning them all into passives) would be a mistake. -- People are already talking about how easy the game is, asking for harder difficulties, etc. By adding more passives buffs, you're effectively lowering the requirements to attain that kind of power. Likewise, reducing their recharge would provide more available god-hood. Even if it's not even close to perma, if a character has several over powerful clicks, they would become something else that could potentially fill in the gap. -- Having said that, not everyone plays the meta game, and having (for example) Eye of the Magus turn into 5% res & 2.5% def all would have less of an impact on a Blaster than it would a Brute. Even if you don't use the click powers that often, they can really help out in a pinch (like taking out an EB that possesses your kryptonite). -- I don't want everything to become homogeneous. I don't think everything should always be 100% mathematically better. One of the really cool things about CoH is that you can play a variety of characters and have wildly different experiences, even with the same AT. Different ATs, powersets, and builds have different priorities and value things different. Would changing Accolades be the straw that broke the camels back? No, of course not, but it is just another brick leading in that direction. ... having said all that, I think we can all agree that one of them isn't in the same ballpark - it isn't even the same sport - as the others. *cough Crey Pistol cough* You could double / half everything on it and I still don't think it would have a meaningful impact on any combat situation (no matter how contrived). :P