Captain Powerhouse

That variety was lost when everyone started building for instant snipe. Slow snipe was something only used outside of combat, as an opener. My change was done with the intention of preserving and amplifying that, by making the out of combat version deal more damage.

The double stealth fix is coming in first, the translucency fix is coming in a later fix. Both were supposed to come in the same patch but [bleeps] happened.

There is the variable that was missing. Build Up itself for scrappers grants +100% damage buff (not 80%) Chance for Build Up, on Scrappers, should also grant another +100% when it goes of. That is why you were seeing 200% when you activated both. Note that Chance for Build up is a PPM power, and although it will have a very good chance to proc on a high recharge power like Build Up, there is always a 10% chance (i think its 10%) it wont go off.

That power has never granted direct damage buff. Instead it just enables the FieryEmbrace attribute that you see in other powers. It does grant just a damage buff in PvP, though.

Fix in the queue. As far as suppression: Stealth should be suppresssing half it's defense in combat. Invisibility should be suppressing all it's defense in combat.

AT?

It has always existed, and the reason DPS/DPA potential wildly defeers despite it existing is precisely that the formula was never adjusted to account for animation time. The formula makes a power that recharges in 5 seconds and has a zero cast time will do the same damage as one that takes 5 seconds to recharge and casts in 5 seconds, even if both powers will end up having drastically different DPA. The formula has always been extremely flawed, but its too intertwined in the game to change it without completely changing how this game feels and plays. Once developers realized the mistake, the best they ever did over time was play around with recharge times to get the desired DPS out of a given power.

This is a tangent but sooner or later SS will be ported to Scrappers, it wont be a carbon copy though, for a couple reasons. First, as it was noted, tanker sets were originally meant to hit slower and harder (at least relative to other powers for their AT.) For the most part, this means they get powers like Seismic Smash, Total Focus and Knockout Blow. Scrappers have over the years received a few similar powers with Kin Melee's Concentrated Strike and Street Justice Crushing Uppercut, but both these powers are actually suffering big penalties on the Scrapper side. Street Justice only crits for the base damage (that is way bellow what the recharge dictates unless you have a high combo level) and Concentrated Strike's "crit" simply means "auto-recharge." So, any port of Super Str (or Energy or Stone) will either have slightly lower recharge versions of these powers that do somewhat less scale damage (due to modifiers they will still do more damage than the tanker versions) or their critcals will be a special trick instead of damage. The other issue is Rage, scrapper damage buff modifiers are much higher than tankers or brutes, and rage, even with one stack, would be extremely strong. So it's likely that they would not get Rage as is, or at all.

That's not accurate. They balanced power damage and secondary effects independently. Early on they never considered the impact of cast time, but the damage/recharge formula was in place since launch and has never been revised. The only time where a secondary effect impacted damage, was when the secondary effect itself was simply more damage. How they valued secondary effects, though, was very arbitrary. If anything, IMO, they undervalued the mitigation capabilities of knockdown and knockback, the effect often is drastically superior at locking down bosses and crowds than holds and stuns (and I mean secondary effect hold and stuns, not the hold or stuns in powers that are dedicated crowd control powers.)

Personally, the only reason I can see for an increased aggro cap (or removal) is increased challenge, but in this game, that rarely works in practice. It would be kinda interesting, though, if there was no aggro cap, but anyone that happens to have the aggro of more than 17 foes starts to take extra damage more often. Basically, the defense, elusiveness, and resist caps of anyone will start to gradually go down as soon as they go over 17 foes. Now THAT would make things interesting and challenging. It's a shame we cant go back in time and implement such a thing instead of the aggro cap.

Be careful what you ask for. This would mean the power would need to be flagged to ignore outside buffs, just like every other resist power in the game. That means it would no longer be buffed by Power Boost-like powers.

I dont have any current plans to change the type of crash, but should it change, it will continue to be irresistible on any form it takes.

There is a fix for this on the queue.

About my previous post: I didn’t mean to state that was a direction we were aiming for. It was an idea and wanted to gather some thoughts on it. At this point it has been discarded. I also want to note that at least at this point, we are not going to be adding any more mutually exclusive powers like Practiced/Master brawler. That was an experiment that we were planning to roll back long ago but wasn’t done due to many real life events. At this point it may be a perpetual oddity as it may be considered cemented and protected by the cottage rule. As for rage: nothing that gets proposed will ever make everyone happy, but here is another thought for consideration, one that is more likely to hit Justin at some point: Rage will no longer crash if it isn’t stacked. Activating Rage while still under the effect of a previous activation would insure that the previous application crashes. To make it easier to use, there would be a marker, potentially a colored ring, that would indicate that the power is ready to be used without triggering the crash. Anyone that feels the crash is worth the penalty, can set it to auto and make it recharge as fast as they feel like it.

There is a patch on the queue, don't have date, maybe the next couple days. I *think* that will be addressed, it seemed to work right on internal testing.

What archetypes? For both, the one that works and the one that does not.

Instasnipe mechanics were introduced because many blast sets lack a third decent single target attack, or their attacks dont have enough cooldown to sustain a single target attack chain without incorporating snipes into the attacks. The goal was to make them usable for everyone, but it also was considered to be too strong to just "give away" so the ToHit requirement was added. This was obscure, clunky and buggy (highlight rings were never consistent) and did nothing for most develping builds. It ended up only being enjoyed by end-game builds, or /device blasters (to the point where /devices was starting to be considered required for many blaster primaries.) This change made it so that snipes, inside combat, are instantly fast always, BUT at a lower damage scale. Want the old damage scale? you still need the ToHit buff. You dont want to get rid of that Gaussian or Kimset, unless you want to sacrifice your damage for something else, like defense or recharge. If you dont ever want to execute a slow snipe, you can either open the attack chain with a different attack, slot the new Special Snipe IO, or just let the enemy attack first as that will also activate quick snipes.

That is indeed something I want to touch on. I will attempt to go through as much as i can, but would be helpful to get a list on this.

That one was intentionally changed to have a longer 1.33 second cast time from it's former version. It's sequencer was the most broken. It had a known impact on performance.

It's a single target AoE. The idea was a heal-draining power that would be able to automatically try to leach from a different target as a fallback. The power has been source of lots of confusion over the years and may just be changed to be a version of Life Drain in the future.

For what it's worth: sequencers that are not triggered correctly (as is the case by just hard-skippiing the interrupt segment with the unfinished quicksnipe implementation) can be subject to odd bugs like the CANTMOVE flag sporadically not triggering. Sometimes the whole animation wont play. It's a big issue with No Redraw themes.

The old version of the fast snipe always played only frames 62 to 100, at normal speed, that's a total of 1.3 seconds rooted. The new version of the fast snipe plays frames 1-100 at an accelerated speed to make sure it only takes 1.3 seconds to do the whole sequence. As far as root time goes, there should had not been any change. The biggest effective difference is that the blast goes off at frame 17 when it used to go off at frame zero.

I see what you mean more clearly now. I am looking at the old snipe sequencer declaration, though. Frames 1 - 40 are played without the cantmove flag, then frames 40 to 60 (these are always inclusive btw) are played on a loop for however long the interrupt window may be, also without a cantmove flag. The actual attack executes frames 62 to 100 of the snipe at normal speed, all of it with the CANTMOVE flag. Note that the slow snipes were not touched at all during this patch, only the quick versions were altered (and not altered, new sequencer definitions were made for these.)

This was discussed during beta, I explained as best I could here: Note: there was no intentional reduction on the snipe projectile speed. If that is something you are experiencing, I can look into to make sure once fired it moves at the same speed as it used to.