Captain Powerhouse

There is no solid plan at the time, but you will continue to have to take the T1 at character creation, that is unlikely to ever change.

Thing to keep in mind that I think has been missed by many, just clarified this in the tanker thread: Tanker modifier changes only impact melee modifiers, not ranged modifiers. Epic pools now use ranged modifiers that have been buffed to the old base tanker modifier. This means, Epic pools for tankers operate at scale 0.8, not much higher than brute's. For the most part, This will throw a complicated monkey wrench at most estimates without running complete attack chain analysis, or better yet in game testing.

I have no current plans to lower the damage scale, do keep in mind the .95 damage scale is only for melee attacks. All epic and pool power ranged attacks are now using the buffed ranged modifier, meaning they don't get an increase in damage, a big reason why most quick modifier comparisons between brute damage and tankers will not translate to in-game experiences. Fire Ball, Gloom, Ball Lightning all those powers are not getting a buff and will continue to operate at a 0.8 damage scale.

Sorry, but there are many reasons for that, and before there is any accusations, although feedback was a factor on the consideration, it was not the main reason. The nature of forced T1s will be reviewed in the future, for all archetypes, no timeline on that, but for the time being it will have to wait. The changes to Battle Axe, Martial Arts, and War Mace AoE power order is still going ahead, and Stone melee will have Tremor at 28, with Hurl going to 35.

Two things, because the last few pages of this have been an unfruitful read of back and forth repetition with very few posts going out of that pattern: @redlynne, the person that created the cottage rule also changed the order of powers. That should be clear enough note that changing the order of powers is not a cottage rule infraction. That being told, the T1/T2 order change will be still reverted in the next patch. Some other power reorders will remain, though, but Fault will also go back to level 20. When you take longer to take down a foe, it's not just your offensive set eating away at your endurance. It's also your defensive toggles, any epic power you use, and any endurance drain tossed at you, in addition to any regeneration or healing the enemy might have extending the fight even longer than the lower damage would predict based on dps differences alone. Just because a tanker might have 75% the damage of a scrapper does not mean the scrapper kills things 75% the speed. That extra time might extend things much further. Against some foes, it might mean the difference between even out-damaging the enemy regeneration at all. That being said, there is a reason this is testing. The exact amount of the Max End increase is still under evaluation and might change.

Players should not need to turn off that feature to make this go away. This should be fixed on the next patch, thanks for bringing it up.

That would be true with absolutely any change. Heck, the addition of a new invention set could easily change the “having the best attack chain” definition (plus there is never a perfect attack chain in this game, there is always a better situational chain given endless variables.)

There is a fix for this currently in the test server.

It's my understanding that PPM ignores buffs, only slotted enhancements count. But best way to know for sure is to test it.

Not right now but in the next patch it will be exempt.

That is expected. One of those should drop in combat. The bug was that it was giving 3.5 (2x) defense on both those lines for a total of 7 defense.

O2boost should had been mentioned, it seems changed on my side. -Range in Hurricane seems to be working on PvP, but it's flagged as ignoring Tanker/Brute/Scrapper/Stalkers and that might mess with Real Numbers. I think thats an artifact from before all melee powers were made to ignore -range so I'll remove that flag.

The radius is going down to 60% because it was just way too good in debuf, taunt and mez auras. a 12.8 radius oppressive gloom? sure. 16, that's a bit too much. Also, increasing the radius of an attack has an extremely higher impact in area coverage than increasing the arc of a cone.

If that was the case, this would not be happening now, and the AT would have been given 1.1 modifiers over 5 years ago. If i was to go for my personal favorite idea and ignore everything anyone else said, tankers would be running with an offensive/defensive toggle right now. My potential bias is one of the reasons I have forced myself to take years on changing anything on the Archetype. I proposed countless approaches to give a tanker a better place over the last decade and a half, to both former devs when the game was live and to players. Almost everything that has been suggested here I had at one way or another suggested too, and was shut down by one, the other or basically both due to me bringing it up multiple times. At the end of the day, the most common thing everyone came to, is they made a melee at to tank and punch, and no one wanted to see crazy complicated mechanics getting in the way, or be sidelined into melee defenders, or any other AT. A version of this was actually tested a few years ago and had had the most positive reaction of anything that was proposed up to that point, in great part because it does not force most tank players to do anything but what they already did: grab as much aggro and AoE as much of it as possible. Even if i took a melee-defender approach, the effects of it would have to be extremely subtle for (something that just comes for free) to make any impact, or it would have to be a whole AT redesign. At that point one simply enters New AT territory. I been meaning to do an explanation on the reason behind most of the details of the patch and what they are meant to address, every time i start I end up with a giant wall of text and i want to make it more to-the-point than that, but have had no much time as i been spending most the last two days fixing pvp bugs. But want to cover a handful of points here: The base damage scale is being increased to the point it is precisely because forever the devs maintained that the tanker should be doing 75% the damage of a scrapper. In practice, the tanker was doing, an average of 60%~65% the damage of a scrapper, after mods, crits and higher +damage mods came to play. A base damage scale of 0.95 takes the tanker to approximately that point. Leveling up, the tanker can take a lot longer to kill things than the equivalent scrapper, but they burn endurance at the exact same rate. That is where the +max endurance comes into play, it's meant to let them continue a fight longer before their end is so low they can only use their T1/T2 or eat a blue pill. The Target caps and area increase simply allow the tanker to use his own hide to solo more efficiently. This wont do do as much as most people think in teams as blasters or any other AT with a nuke ends up obliterating minions in half a second, leaving way fewer enemies around than players realize. Even solo, the tanker will eventually see the enemy count drop bellow a point where there is an advantage. It is even less of an advantage when you count that the target cap increase only applies to melee set attacks, and both Brutes and Tankers get access to 16 target cap attacks on their epics pools, not to mention Incarnate Judgement at that level of play.

There are many reasons I dont want to expand the bruise to every power, from personal to actual balance. From a personal point, going all the way to launch, I didn't roll a tank just to debuff things so others can kill them better. I rolled a tank to punch things in the face, while i get punched in the face and my team mates are mostly safe. From a balance perspective, it still means a second tank is the least optimal party member you can bring aboard. Allowing it to stack is also problematic in it's own ways. A thing I am considering to do, though, is to increase some of the modifiers used by power pools like Leadership, allowing for some tanks to opt into more support-oriented builds on an individual basis, instead of the AT as a whole being shoe-horned into a new support role via global mechanics. Between Leadership and epic pool powers like Darkest Night or Melt Armor, a tanker could build for more support.

That shockwave won’t be getting any benefit from this.

There is a misconception here: the game is balanced in such a way that’s SO builds should be able to complete all non-incarnate content, solo or in team. This does not mean x8+4, though. That being said, the devs kept spreadsheets that showed they always attempted to account for things like hasten running all the time, or having weave/tough/combat jump/etc. They always thrived to make the sets “balanced” in an SO world but also at least tried (with their limited tools) to control what happened when other things came into play. Balancing towards SO does not mean ignoring IOs or pools.

Nope, the set should have a taunt. I’ll look into it thanks for reporting.

A note about the Mez Toggles: it seems that the game power info screens will not show a duration on toggles. They all seem to be correct on the data side.

The best I can say is the least useful examples are AE farms, they are too optimized for kill speed and AoE and dont translate well into game-content. As a side encouragement, partially unrelated, there are some under-the-hood changes that require lots of testing of complicated content. This means: iTrials, TFs, regular Trials, all that kind of stuff. it would help take out two birds with one hurled boulder if that kind of content was used for tests too.

Some sets will be looked at a later time, but there is a lot to test here already. Rather keep the focus on these tanker changes for the time being.

If it goes through, only upon respec.

They won’t, the cap change only applies to melee sets.

Not every power gets the increased target cap right now. The first two Titan weapons cones don’t, nor does Claws Shockwave. Few more powers will have their caps also limited, example: Spine Burst

Reading through every post in this thread has been a bit time consuming. Thank you everyone for the feedback, it had been useful. Ill get into more details at some point tomorrow but a few changes are going to be made in the next parch. A few highlights, just to keep the thread from over focusing on those points, is that the +radius on Spheres will be lowered to +60% (cone arcs will remain as they stand,) this means 8ft radius goes up to 12.8, 10ft goes up to 16ft. The damage cap will be changed to 575%, Judgement powers will stop being boosted by this area buff, and stone melee power order will be changed, returning Fault to its old spot. Plus a few other set-specific tweaks.