Sarrate

I had a similar, but different idea. Have Teleport grant this (Soft Landing / Combat Teleport) toggle upon choosing it. The toggle costs 0 endurance, doesn't get detoggled, etc. When teleporting, it just checks the status of the toggle. If you're in "travel mode," you hover. If you're in "combat mode," you don't. It's simple, easy to understand, and doesn't require a suite of binds to really benefit from it. (There could be multiple toggles, too. Perhaps even an "Adaptive Teleport" that behaves switches between combat and travel mode depending on whether you've attacked / been attacked recently.)

It wouldn't be close to perma without IOs. No other set armor set requires IO use to maintain status protection. Also, keep in mind that Granite has -recharge. Even if it you did have enough recharge to make it perma outside Granite, toggling up Granite could break that. If you told me you were going to tie status protection to any Dull Pain equivalent power, I'd say hard pass.

Alternate suggestions: 1) Give the various armors a smaller amount of status protection that stack with each other (but suppress fully / partially with Rooted). That would: * give players a path to have full or partial status protection on the move * not force players to get all armors for status protection (Rooted still exists) * not delay status protection for low levels * not mix a heal, max hp boost and status protection (and those powers take some recharge to make fully perma, unless you're talking about making status protection longer than the typical 2 minutes on click status protection) 2) Make Rooted's status protection linger for, say, 30 seconds after detoggling. This would allow Stone to turn it off, reposition, then re-Root and be fine. Potential problems being they forget to re-Root or they're under the effects of -recharge that prevents them from being able to re-Root before the 30 second grace period is up. <-- hasn't played ever Stone Armor to a high level

I'll be honest, I have not experienced super high end play here on Homecoming (highest I got back on Live was Alpha and Judgement slotted, and I haven't even hit 50 yet here), so what I'm going to say may be completely off base with how things play out at that level. However, prior to being fully Incarnated, Longbow weren't scarier than Council because of Wardens, it's because the various Longbow mobs packed a wider variety of debuffs that could likely find a chink in a player's armor somewhere... with special mention to Nullifiers who with their unresistible, AoE -res. The fact that they're lieutenants made them in a way, worse because there would be so many of them. There are a lot of groups designed this way, where any individual enemy isn't scary, but when engaging a large group, their number of buffs/debuffs could overwhelm. ... having said that, it only works if mobs live long enough for their effects to stack like that. Even EBs, unless their stats were ridiculous (high hp, high defense, high resistance, high regen/healing, some combination of these), I imagine they'd be killed pretty quickly. If AoE spam took out most of the rest of the spawn, then the whole group would focus down EBs fairly quick. If you can figure out a way for mobs to last long enough, I think the most interesting option is to distribute the power throughout the enemy rosters. Maybe by giving enemies conditional powers if certain criteria are met. (Longbow, for example, gain more powers as levels rise. They get Beanbag at lvl30+ and Sonic Grenade / Concussion at lvl40+.) It also gives players more ways to deal with problems (CC / focus down priority targets? Divide spawns so AoE buffs/debuffs are less effective? etc). I think "ignore powers players have invested in" is something that should be used sparingly. Nullifiers having Sonic Grenade is unique, and makes them a priority target. If every Longbow with a gun had it, it would feel cheap.

That sounds like CoH, in a nutshell. If you think about it from a systems standpoint, it's busted as hell, but it's busted in just the right spots that it kind of works out. I remember reading an article by a dev for... AC1 or AC2? Anyways, he originally was pursuing numerical balance to the furthest extent, but players hated it. Some players sought out weaker characters for a challenge while others enjoyed stronger characters for more obvious reasons. So I agree with @Obitus, I'd rather have a somewhat flawed system than one that takes away options from weaker sets. On the other hand, damage buffs will still help boost KO Blow, while they won't do much for Char.

Or any characters using Lucks to try to power through a difficult situation. That's something I see as a defining feature of CoH, and restricting it would be a mistake. edit: Lower hp alone makes them squishier. They have a lower hp pool to soak successive hits and also regen less hp/sec.

As I recall, there are two places to specify a duration. One is the power's cast time (what you see in the detailed info / Mids). The other is in the animation's rooted duration. If a power's cast time is greater than the rooted time, then you'll be unable to cast powers in that gap, but you will be able to move. If a power's rooted time is greater than the case time, then you're not doing anything until the rooted duration is over, no matter what the cast time says. I'm assuming that they're reusing animations with a longer root time than the mouth animations.

Kin / Sonic / Psi Defender I knew leveraging -Res and +Dmg would do stupid things for a team, but what I hadn't fully considered is what it would do to hard targets. Consider that resistance resists resistance and damage buffs/debuffs. Sonic's blasts have -Res, which not only makes them get hit harder... it also reduces their ability to resist damage debuffs. Between Siphon Power and Fulcrum Shift, Kin can stack copious -dmg. Since AVs don't (and can't) have special resistance to -dmg debuffs, it's more effective at making AVs less dangerous than other debuffs. He was a total glass cannon, but man could he kick a team into ludicrous speed.

Probably the weakest character that made it to 50 was a Sonic / Elec / Elec Defender. The primary & secondary didn't really have any synergy. I only had two blasts (no fast snipe). Voltaic Sentinel is untargettable, so no placing DIsruption Field on it. Sonic Dispersion - stay in place so squishes know where to go for status protection. Short Circuit - hope in & drain, then hop out. Only good at mass drain when Power Sink was off CD (double the recharge because it's in an Epic Pool) One thing she did have going for her was that res buffs (both powersets and set bonuses) were rarer back then, so resistance sets [/i]really[/i] liked getting to the resistance hard cap. Weak though she was, I'll be damned if I didn't like the concept. Wonder how much better it would be with a usable Zapp and Thunderous Blast... (Look, I said better, not good. :P)

Two other possibilities: 5) Instead of instantly dropping your health and endurance, they could have a timed -10% hp & -10% end / sec for X seconds so long as your health & end are above Y. Basically, Unstoppable would leave you exhausted, and constantly drain hp/end from you, potentially more than the current 90%, but it would be over time so that you could react to it. 6) Slap on a large -MaxHP & -MaxEnd. This wouldn't move your health or end bars at all, but they'd be much smaller, reducing your effective health and end pools. This might be a bit weird, though, as after it wears off, you could end up staying at full health (since your current health percent scales as MaxHP changes). So the crash would be much subtler and easier to notice... which is probably a bad thing.

Sorry to dredge up something from last page, but I wanted to make a comment on this. The way I look at it is this, if you're in danger of dying, then yes, a T9 would help / prevent that... but it also means that you'd be weaker in the times when it's not up (missing a core power you normally could have taken). This isn't just at lower levels, but higher levels too (why I was pointing out pushing Invincibility from 28 to 35, that's a looong time to wait for a core and defining survivability power). The way I'm reading your post makes it sound like you're assuming people will be on teams, which is not the case. Most of my /played on Homecoming has been solo. So I very much value the base level performance of a set, as it means I can tick the difficulty to spawn more enemies sooner. A T9 wouldn't help me do that because of the gaps. I'm not saying that god-modes are absolutely garbage or that they should be removed from the game. No, I understand their uses, they can be fun, and they can save the day. I'd just argue very strongly against moving them to the front of sets - especially globally. The opportunity cost is too high, imo.

Also, with a targeted cone, you can guarantee that you'll hit the target you select. If it was just fired in the direction you're facing and you misjudged the distance, the power would activate and your target would be out of range and not get hit.

As things are currently designed, I think that moving T9s (especially the older ones like Unstoppable) to T2 would be problematic. -- The uptime in these powers is pathetic. Unstoppable has a 180s duration and 1,000 second recharge (16.67 minutes), for an uptime of 18%. Longer recharge powers like Dull Pain (120 / 360 = 33%) already feel pretty bad at low levels. It enough to put me in "save it for when I really need it" mode. -- Even though low level enhancers are weaker, you can't just lower the recharge because characters would eventually get high level enhancers. If you lowered their recharges, then you'd either have to reduce their duration, strength, or just flat out make their recharges unenhanceable. The newer powers that go this route tend to be much milder and shorter. Their real strength isn't alone, but how they compliment the rest of the set. (eg: WP + Tough on SOs is around 66% s/l res, with SoW you can hit 90% s/l res. That's a dramatic change. SoW by itself? Not as much.) -- A lot of these powers have brutal crashes. Unstoppable is uniquely bad at this. Even if it never outright killed you, it's dropping you to 10% hp. That's going to take a long time to recover from, almost 4 minutes, or several inspirations, for which you have a very limited tray size for at that level. (Hmm, Rest used to have a really long recharge, but I think that's been relaxed quite a bit?) -- It'd be pushing back attaining your baseline powers further. It's not too bad for the earlier powers, but when you start realizing that it would push T7 to T8, that's an extra 7 levels to wait for some set defining powers. (Brute & Scrapper Invincibility, for example.) -- I was going to say you could give characters some low uptime "super power"... but (1) I don't think that melee characters really need much help and (2) that gets trickier when you start thinking about non-melee ATs. It's an interesting thought experiment that clearly got my brain going, but at low levels, I'd just prefer to get my mainstay powers than an intermittent god mode.

Come now, @Call Me Awesome, there is no need to exaggerate things... It's a 3 minutes suicide switch, not 2. ;)

Uhm, @Werner, you failed before you even began. 😉

Oh fascinating! I was looking at Mid's Reborn (not perfect, but more convenient and up to date), but after you said that I looked at CoD on the Wayback Machine and you're right, it lists it as unresistible. I'm pretty sure that's a mistake, though, as I remember having my regen shut down in the past. So you didn't, sorry for putting words in your mouth. I agree that Regen is click heavy and it's part of what defines its playstyle. I'd push for absorbs (or other solutions) that would try to address the problem of dying to burst damage. It's really annoying dying to damage that you could have healed but didn't because a) stuck in an animation b) reaction time c) you didn't heal because you were at X% health and didn't think you needed to d) you did heal when at X% health (and you didn't need to) now you do and it's on recharge e) you had IH up, but still died because infinite regen still doesn't solve the burst damage problem. That's the real rub, it doesn't matter how fast you heal/regen, you can still get burst down if you can't first take the hit and survive.

I'm not an expert wrt to procs (your guide was fantastic, Bopper), and what it really sounds like we're trying to solve multiple, competing problems at the same time. 1) When using a flat rate, fast recharging powers were disproportionately powerful (eg: Neutrino Bolt) while slower powers were left out. 2) Using PPM and being affected by recharge (enhancements, set bonuses, etc, or some combination of the two) leads to fast recharging powers being overly penalized. It also leads to really weird build behavior where people might avoid recharge to maximize procs. It "feels" wrong. 3) Long recharge powers basically guarantee procs and thus can be transformed into mini nukes. I feel like making the proc rate more sensitive to recharge exasperates #2, and I think that just flat out making them only proc X times per minute basically just makes them a timed proc rather than a random one. (I also can't help but wonder if it would make the alpha strike problem worse, as all your procs would be refreshed at the start of the fight, fire, then potentially get refreshed for the next spawn.) I was thinking @Caulderone 's was on the right track of having a higher minimum and lower maximum to keep thing random. It could lead to #1 potentially being problematic, but that's probably less of a balance problem than inadvertently creating nukes. An option that could be consider if fast attack + recharge + higher proc minimum was too much is scale the proc's damage downward by some amount based on how much a power is beating the minimum proc rate. Of course, that makes procs less exciting when they happen - as they'd be less impactful. The real question is what is the priority of the problems with procs? Once you know that, then you can fashion a solution around those priorities.

I've stumbled across several powers that accept End Mod enhancements, but whose +recovery effect is flagged as unenhanceable. I suppose this isn't a bug per se, more of a confusing oversight in a power's design, as there are no other end effects on these powers. There are probably more, but these are the ones I know about: Elec Armor/Power Surge Invuln/Unstoppable Rad Armor/Particle Shielding Rad Armor/Meltdown

Actually, much of Regen's +regen is unenhanceable [1]. All of it is resistible and thus fully affected by regen debuffs. [1] Fast Healing: 75% fully enhanceable Integration: 50% enhanceable, 100% unenhanceable Instant Healing: 200% enhanceable, 600% unenhanceable I'd argue that Bio's gimmick is Adaption, not absorbs. The only other comparable sets are Stone Armor (normal and fully defense) and Kheldians (a whole AT, not a powerset). Bio only has two powers that give absorbs (Ablative Carapace and Parasitic Aura). If that is enough to make absorb it's gimmick, then one could argue defense is Invuln's gimmick because of Invincibility and Tough Hide. :P Honestly, Bio has a little bit of everything (adaption, +max hp, +regen, +recovery, +defense, +resist, +absorb, +dmg, damage aura, -regen, -dmg) to really say any one defensive stat is its thing. I'm going to go out on a limb and say one reason you're singling out absorb is because it's new and not as widely utilized. If absorbs were available from the get go, I think Bio's absorbs would just be another layer rather than a defining feature.

The next obvious question is "how does that compare to other Tanker sets like Invuln and WP"? I mean, Tankers were always going to be tankier than a Scrapper regardless (unless there was something seriously broken going on).

Oh for sure. I didn't say it would be easy to quantify, but that I think it's an important fact to consider. One way to do that would be to simulate how Regen fares against different attack compositions and look for (early) deaths in places where they should be sustainable. Hmm... 🤔 Gotcha, that matches my expectation.

Fantastic work, @Galaxy Brain! One thing I want to point out, regardless of how high Scrapper Regen's peak sustain is, what is just as important as avg incoming DPS is how it comes in. Handling smooth incoming dps (lots of small, spaced out hits) is no problem for Regen, while an equivalent average incoming dps coming in large discrete chunks that can be lethal. (Consider facing a lot of minions with frequent smaller hits vs handling a few bosses with very large hits.) The lower a Regen's health gets, the more dangerous the situation because a smaller attack could insta-gib them before their regen/healing can compensate. Also, the closer incoming dps is to a Regen's sustain, the longer it takes for Regen to get back out of the danger zone. The way I see it, sustainable dps isn't the only metric we should be looking at, but how susceptible they are to dying to a burst damage event at various health levels.

True, but those are already available to Tankers and not changing. I was listing the only changes you'd see to Regen itself. On that note, I was mistaken! There are a few additional changes: Fast Healing: 25.95% --> 32.44% regen resistance Reconstruction: 15% toxic res --> 20% toxic res It's the little things that pull the set together. 😉

Don't forget the time that one of the devs (Geko, I believe) was showing off how overpowered Regen was in PvE by standing in a hoard of +4 enemies (or something like that) and not even flinching. Of course, the dev server he was testing on was busted and the Purple Patch wasn't applying.

Just pointing out that Tanker numbers would affect the following: 1) Resilience (9.38% -> 12.5% resistance) 2) Moment of Glory (71.3% -> 95% defense & resistance) 3) Lower regeneration cap (3,000% for Scrappers/Stalkers, 2,500% for Brutes/Tankers) - not that this matters, with 3 slotted Health, Fast Healing, Integration, and Instant Healing, you're still only at ~1560% regen Those are the only powers that'd change in numbers. Due to having more health as a Tanker, you'd have stronger heals and regenerate more hp/sec, though.