Pain Dom - Enforce Morale bug

[Hedgefund]

Recently I noticed I wasn't getting a +rch buff from a PD teammate who cast Enforce Morale onto me.  

 

My recollection from live was that it provided a 5% buff to +rch that stacked up to 5 times.

 

So I went about logging on my own PD character and another character on a different account to document for this post.  What I found was more interesting than expected...

 

At first I cast it on a lvl 50 with a bunch of recharge bonuses.  No +rch from EM was shown but I thought the other bonuses cluttered up the screen and made the point more difficult to convey, so I switched to a lvl 1 with no bonuses.  

 

Before casting Enforce Morale on lvl 1:

 

Spoiler

 

After spamming EM 6 times:

 

Spoiler

 

Wait, wha?  There's the recharge I expected.  Maybe I somehow missed it on the 50 I tried earlier, so I log that back in to see.

 

Lvl 50 with no EM:

 

Spoiler

 

Same lvl 50 WITH EM (see buff bar):

Spoiler

 

Recharge is unchanged above, status effects show EM.

 

So I change to build 2, which has nothing in it, with a notable exception...

Spoiler

 

With 3 EMs cast (see buff bar) I get a 5% recharge bonus.  I notice my base empowerment buff is still in effect to grant a total of 25%.  I delete it and lo and behold:

 

Spoiler

 

There's a 25% +rch buff from EM, with 6 EMs cast.

 

So, it seems that your limiting function is using all recharge buffs, not just EM itself, to max out the recharge buffs from EM.  That's the hypothesis I present to you now.

 

I hope this gets dev attention so this power can work as it's intended.

[UberGuy]

I'm not sure this is a bug. Or, rather, I'm not sure it's not a bug in the description.

 

While the power description suggests that what matters is how many applications of the buff you apply, what it really does is check how much the target already has of the buffs.

 

You can see this on the power's CoD page (link is to the Defender version).

 

The recharge boost has this condition

if (target>Str.kRechargeTime < 1.21) && (target>kMeter < 0.9)

 

The movement speed boosts have these respective conditions (I omitted the bit that checks for Null the Gull's "don't buff my movement" token.)

(target>Cur.kRunSpeed < 1.25) && (target>kMeter < 0.9)
(target>Cur.kFlySpeed < 1.25) && (target>kMeter < 0.9)
(target>Cur.kSpeedJumping < 1.25) && (target>kMeter < 0.9)
(target>Cur.kJumpHeight < 1.12) && (target>kMeter < 0.9)

 

So basically the buffs stop doing anything if the target already has more than a certain amount of buff from any source. What's not really clear is whether that was always intended and the wording is weak, or if this is designed incorrectly. (Making each effect have its own separate stacking limit is possible, but nothing like what they actually did here..)

 

What doesn't make sense to me at all is the kMeter test. That's normally for things like Rage and Domination, and means this power won't apply these buffs to a Dom with a full Domination bar, a Brute with 90% Fury or (IIRC) a hidden Stalker. That seems exceptionally weird.