Weekly Discussion 70: T9's Part 2

[GM Vayek]

2 hours ago, GM Miss said:

I saw someone mention mass confuse working on a person and making them sort of become your temp pet for a while, that sounds awesome. 

That would be awesome! Especially if given pet controls, like a temporary Mastermind. That might be a little too far into the over powered spectrum, but still is a cool thought!

[Arcanum]

There are a few changes I'd like to see, personally.

Mass Confusion is obviously one, given the decline to XP you get when using it. Thematically I understand the reasoning but the practicum missed the mark in my opinion. The NPC pet control was a nifty idea I saw suggested, though I'm not unsure of the technical aspects in making that work. Another concept might be a pet similar to Phantasm/Decoys - a sort of Astral Form of yourself? Just ideas!

 

I would also like to see some pet adjustments (specifically Jack Frost, but a few of the other pets could do with a onceover as well).

[Patti]

Maybe make fiery imps explode on death?

[Patti]

Maybe make fiery imps explode on death?

[tidge]

I've made this point in the AT sub-forums, w.r.t. Mass Confuse and XP:

 

The HC game is actually in a very good place with Mass Confuse (and similar powers) because of the ability to slot %damage procs in the power; scoring damage on the confused groups puts the caster 'on record' for claiming both XP and (more importantly, IMO) drops when enemies are (eventually) defeated. I won't fault anyone from keeping Mass Confuse slotted without the procs (to avoid aggro) but I like the option and side effect of getting drops from enemies which defeat each other.

 

This is why I'd prefer a reduction in the inherent recast time for Mass Confuse, but not too much: I want the %proc rate to be as close to the ceiling as possible, even if slotting a (nearly) full IO set. I think of this power as a 'nuke', but it is only the %procs that make it so.

[Zepp]

2 hours ago, tidge said:

I've made this point in the AT sub-forums, w.r.t. Mass Confuse and XP:

 

The HC game is actually in a very good place with Mass Confuse (and similar powers) because of the ability to slot %damage procs in the power; scoring damage on the confused groups puts the caster 'on record' for claiming both XP and (more importantly, IMO) drops when enemies are (eventually) defeated. I won't fault anyone from keeping Mass Confuse slotted without the procs (to avoid aggro) but I like the option and side effect of getting drops from enemies which defeat each other.

 

This is why I'd prefer a reduction in the inherent recast time for Mass Confuse, but not too much: I want the %proc rate to be as close to the ceiling as possible, even if slotting a (nearly) full IO set. I think of this power as a 'nuke', but it is only the %procs that make it so.

If you decreased the recharge to 60s, then the probability to proc for Mass Confuse slotted with Malaise Illusion: Chance for Damage (Psionic) & Confused/Range + Cacophony: Chance for Damage (Energy) + Superior Will of the Controller: Recharge/Chance for Psionic Damage, Accuracy/Control Duration/Endurance, & Accuracy Control Duration would be 77% for Malaise & Cacophony & 90% (capped) for SWotC. With 200% global recharge (not uncommon for a Controller build because of the high recharge requirements) you could have the power up every 18.565s (give or take). That is an average DpA of 112.2231 (give or take) in an AoE power with a 25 radius. That would be a reduction from 122.0455 (give or take) or an 8.0481% (give or take) reduction in damage per activation (or a 267.8076% increase in DpS from the power for a different perspective).

Seeing as 60s is the number being discussed, does that sound reasonable to you? (30s would be 83.28892 DpA, or a 31.7558% reduction in DpA and 445.9534% increase in DpS with around a 9.2825s recharge).

 

With a full SWotC IO set, the Prob2Proc requires a 77.43089s (give or take) recharge to maintain the 90% cap (96.38995 DpA). At 60s it drops to 70.6489%(75.66496 DpA) and at 30s it drops to 37.3441% (39.99555 DpA).

(If you want to check my math, look at @Bopper's post on PPM calculations, the associated PPM list, and MS Excel (your friend and mine for calculation fun and fancy).

Edited October 3, 2020 by Zepp

[Spectre7878]

Give pets more custom looks. Like gremlins for example. I would like just balls of Electric. 
 

Make pets a bit less squishy. Especially for controller since it is our only damage output. 
 

I would like to see pets come earlier in our careers since it would give us a little solo play when we want to

 

 

[chi1701]

As a WS Dark Extraction is considered T9 and what I would like to see is a 100% guarantee of a pet regardless if the mob disappears during the animation.

[Blastit]

On 10/2/2020 at 6:12 PM, Lost Deep said:

The thing about mass confuse (and confuse in general) that you have to remember is that enemies defeated by confusion (one way or another) do not give EXP. While confuse abilities are still very useful, this means that using them still risks you getting less EXP. I don't really care about this, but some people or teams will and do. I'm not sure what the easy fix is, since if it's changed to counting toward EXP then people will use it and then hang back to soak, something that the current setup does admittedly prevent.

 

I thought you got xp proportional to the amount of damage you and your team did to the enemy? So if a confused enemy does 25% of damage to another enemy, you get 75% xp. This is what I remember from previous discussions of the mechanic, anyway. The only conclusion to this matter I've ever heard is that confusion can give you less xp per individual enemy but will increase your rate of xp per minute because fights are much quicker and easier.

[Darkneblade]

Maybe make mass confuse deal containment damage to your victims.

Like you hit enemy with mass confuse. Confused enemy hits another enemy. If it does containment damage (overpower) it should count as your own damage while normal damage count as enemy's damage.

As for Dominator.

Mass confuse the enemy. Confused enemies now has CHANCE to deal double damage. Double damage count as your own damage.

I doubt it will be broken but you never know.

Edited October 5, 2020 by Darkneblade

[tidge]

1 hour ago, Darkneblade said:

Maybe make mass confuse deal containment damage to your victims.

Like you hit enemy with mass confuse. Confused enemy hits another enemy. If it does containment damage (overpower) it should count as your own damage while normal damage count as enemy's damage.

Since we have %Damage procs that can slot into confuse, I wouldn't want Mass Confuse to do damage... there is a play style that doesn't want to draw aggro to the caster. (If mass Confuse draws aggro, I'm wrong... but my Fortunata doesn't draw aggro when casting her non-damaging version).

 

To @Zepp : Those numbers look fine to me for a 60 second (inherent) recharge to Mass Confuse.

Edited October 5, 2020 by tidge

[GM Aurarius]

On 10/2/2020 at 9:58 PM, Patti said:

Maybe make fiery imps explode on death?

The poor fire imps. Do they really deserve having even less of an incentive for people to do their best to keep their little, lovable selves alive?

Edited October 5, 2020 by GM Aurarius
Phrasing

[Sarrate]

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.)

 

On 9/30/2020 at 4:25 AM, Hew said:

This. I feel that many t9s are anything but capstones, and frankly, kind of stupid. As many will recall, t9 nukes for blasters had to be reworked, because _nobody used them_ due to the end cost. This notion that some absurd limitation has to be put on what is a capstone is, frankly, absurd.

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.)

[Tsuko]

On 9/30/2020 at 1:33 AM, Piecemeal said:

Jack Frost

 

[Vanden]

4 hours ago, Blastit said:

I thought you got xp proportional to the amount of damage you and your team did to the enemy? So if a confused enemy does 25% of damage to another enemy, you get 75% xp. This is what I remember from previous discussions of the mechanic, anyway.

Those numbers are how it works when no confuse is in play. If the damage was done by a confused enemy, only 1/4th of the damage they did counts against you. So if you do 75% of the damage to an enemy and confused foes deal the remaining 25%, you get xp as if you did 93.75% of the damage.

[ForeverLaxx]

3 hours ago, Vanden said:

Those numbers are how it works when no confuse is in play. If the damage was done by a confused enemy, only 1/4th of the damage they did counts against you. So if you do 75% of the damage to an enemy and confused foes deal the remaining 25%, you get xp as if you did 93.75% of the damage.

Which makes it even more silly that people still yell at players using confuse powers.

[Blastit]

4 hours ago, Vanden said:

Those numbers are how it works when no confuse is in play. If the damage was done by a confused enemy, only 1/4th of the damage they did counts against you. So if you do 75% of the damage to an enemy and confused foes deal the remaining 25%, you get xp as if you did 93.75% of the damage.

Oh, that's even better than the world I was operating in. A rare but pleasant surprise. Thank you.

[Zepp]

Actually, it works out to 92.30769% xp.

 

100hp target
you do 75
your confused minion does 25
Minion damage counts as 6.25 (25% of 25)

The target now has 81.25 hp
75 is 92.30769% of 81.25.

[Zepp]

2 hours ago, ForeverLaxx said:

Which makes it even more silly that people still yell at players using confuse powers.

It is the perception of lost XP, not the actual lost XP.

[GM Tock]

Fire Imps.  I just wish I could get them in Destiny slot as well, but that's not a Tier 9 thing.

 

But other controller pet owners I think might feel the same way.  (Phantasm Army!) Even if it's mostly just for feeling like a MM for 2 min at a time.

[Sura]

Dare I bring up EMP Arrow?  Recharge 300s and it has an Endurance crash.  But you get extra damage against robots!  EMP Arrow, and it's "clone" EMP pulse are the only Defender primary T9's that have crashes.  At the point where other powersets are getting Lightning Storm, or Heat Loss, or Fulcrum Shift, the already fairly notoriously meh Trick Arrow defender is getting EMP Arrow.

[Galaxy Brain]

For Controllers, I think getting the pet much earlier would be nice, and swapping with their AoE control as a true AoE Control-Nuke power.