Fix Dominator Tar Patch

[macskull]

Hi it’s me! I would have submitted this as a bug report but it is apparently Working As Intended so I am here to lay out a few things so that others may understand how ridiculous this power is.

 

Dominators got access to Tar Patch with the new Dark Mastery pool in Page 7. Sounds cool, good new thematic match for some existing builds. Of course, since Tar Patch is an epic power, it must be strictly inferior to the in-set version for reasons that are still unclear. Generally this is accomplished by a recharge time penalty on the order of 2-3x the source power’s recharge. In-set Tar Patch has a 90 second recharge, so the epic version is set to 180 seconds. This change alone isn’t particularly egregious but it does already put epic Tar Patch at a disadvantage from a usability standpoint. If it was just this difference, I would probably have just shrugged and moved on.

 

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

 

Dark Mastery’s version of Tar Patch is not only slapped with a three minute recharge, but it has a few other key differences that aren’t immediately obvious but make it an objectively worse power even if it wasn’t already on an obnoxiously long cooldown:

• The power has a reduced radius of 15ft instead of 25ft (epic Sleet is the same way, 10ft instead of 20ft).
• The resistance debuff requires a hit check to work. This makes no sense since the rest of the power effects are autohit. On a power like Sleet the hit roll is annoying but not a problem because once a tick lands the target is debuffed for a further 30 seconds, but because of how Tar Patch works the power must make a successful hit roll every 0.5 seconds for 45 seconds. This already means the power is at best 95% as effective as the in-set version during its half-as-much uptime. That’s the best case scenario, which will only happen 0.0063% of the time (and no that’s not a typo).
• The power takes accuracy enhancements to account for point number two, but in order to actually maximize accuracy and recharge you’re forced to turn to multiple enhancements which cost 350-400 million each just to still get worse performance than the in-set version.

 

Come on, we can do better than this.

[Shin Magmus]

In what world should Dominators need to slot Accuracy into their Tar Patch when nobody else does, and when Tar Patch competes with (and loses to) Sleet in another epic on Doms: which doesn't need any Accuracy slotting at all?  It's insane how bad Tar Patch is on them.  80% of players are just going to keep taking Sleet.

[Indystruck]

that's a big oof

[Doomrider]

With changes like this, WAI is starting to feel like "Working as we intend it to, so deal with it" even if the change makes ZERO sense.

The power is already penalized with a reduced radius and increased base recharge.
Now the accuracy requirement just adds another hoop to jump through in order to take advantage of the real reason players take the power.

The way I see it, the accuracy requirement is just an added slot sink to the power because I guess it wasn't already penalized far enough.
A patch of tar should not need to roll an accuracy check. You're standing it, you're affected by it, plain and simple. 

Let's not forget how Tar Patch works relative to powers like Sleet. The enemy has to BE IN IT, for the -res to apply. If they run out of it, welp, no -res.
Unlike Sleet who only has to tag enemies for the 30 sec debuff duration to apply. So add that as another point against Tar Patch.
 

Edited April 24 by Doomrider

[Greycat]

58 minutes ago, macskull said:

The power takes accuracy enhancements to account for point number two, but in order to actually maximize accuracy and recharge you’re forced to turn to multiple enhancements which cost 350-400 million each just to still get worse performance than the in-set version.

 

Honestly, of everything I don't give a damn about this as an argument. There are so many ways to get enhancements, and cost can be variable, so...

 

As for the rest? Yeah. No acc check would be ideal, as it's already getting penalized pretty hard, and no, it doesn't seem all that sensible for the power.

[PeregrineFalcon]

1 hour ago, macskull said:

Of course, since Tar Patch is an epic power, it must be strictly inferior to the in-set version for reasons that are still unclear.

This is why, after Bonfire was nerfed, I asked that the Epic/Ancillary Pools to just be called Ancillary Pools. There's nothing about the "Epic" Power Pools that is in any way, shape, or form epic.

 

I wish you luck in your quest to convince the Council of Fourteen to make Tar Patch worth taking.

[Videra]

Honestly, I do wish Tar Patch was worth taking. That cooldown? The hit check? Cringe. Bonfire also got rinsed for literally no discernible reason - which had the side affect of making every non-patron ancillary pool utterly useless on Masterminds.

[macskull]

13 minutes ago, Greycat said:

Honestly, of everything I don't give a damn about this as an argument. There are so many ways to get enhancements, and cost can be variable, so...

 

As for the rest? Yeah. No acc check would be ideal, as it's already getting penalized pretty hard, and no, it doesn't seem all that sensible for the power.

I’m coming from this with the perspective of having to pay a slot tax for the accuracy that’s required. I don’t know if the summoned pet inherits accuracy buffs from the caster but I’d assume it doesn’t since many summoned pets don’t. Ideally I maximize the accuracy and recharge with as few slots as possible. Tar Patch is unique among area -res patches because it will continuously require hit checks for the most desirable part of the power to work. It takes slow sets but unfortunately only one slow set has both acc and rech in one power and that’s a 4-piece so you’re not getting much out of it. That pretty much leaves you with common 50+5 IOs or the acc/threat/rech D-Sync/Hami.

 

Sure, the cost is going to be variable, and you might get lucky if you run enough Aeons or hard mode LGTFs, but at the end of the day no matter how you slice it you’re having to spend the time or inf or rely on luck just to get a power that still performs worse than the power it’s based on because of an arbitrary design decision.

[Greycat]

6 minutes ago, macskull said:

I’m coming from this with the perspective of having to pay a slot tax for the accuracy that’s required. I don’t know if the summoned pet inherits accuracy buffs from the caster but I’d assume it doesn’t since many summoned pets don’t. Ideally I maximize the accuracy and recharge with as few slots as possible. Tar Patch is unique among area -res patches because it will continuously require hit checks for the most desirable part of the power to work. It takes slow sets but unfortunately only one slow set has both acc and rech in one power and that’s a 4-piece so you’re not getting much out of it. That pretty much leaves you with common 50+5 IOs or the acc/threat/rech D-Sync/Hami.

 

Sure, the cost is going to be variable, and you might get lucky if you run enough Aeons or hard mode LGTFs, but at the end of the day no matter how you slice it you’re having to spend the time or inf or rely on luck just to get a power that still performs worse than the power it’s based on because of an arbitrary design decision.

 

Well, my other main reason to really discard the "cost of enhancement" thing is that - well, 1, if you fix the acc issue, you don't need the ENH any more, and 2, it narrows the perceived impact from "anyone taking the power" to "min-maxers." Sort of like a health risk going from "Everyone in this state who gets water from this source, which equates to millions of people" to "those couple people Dave knows who like snorting Tic-tacs and holding their heads under water." One's impacting a lot more people than the other, and the other's doing something by choice. 😉

[Shin Magmus]

3 minutes ago, Greycat said:

Well, my other main reason to really discard the "cost of enhancement" thing is that...

Fascinating.  My argument against Tar Patch being able to miss, is that it's fucking stupid.  Tar Patch doesn't logically make sense as a power that can miss, and other versions of Tar Patch can't miss.  Epic/Ancillary pools also need to be correctly balanced against each-other, since that's the decision that all players make when they select one pool over another.  Dominator Sleet doesn't need any Accuracy enhanced to work, but Dominator Tar Patch does.

[Greycat]

22 minutes ago, Shin Magmus said:

Fascinating.  My argument against Tar Patch being able to miss, is that it's fucking stupid.  Tar Patch doesn't logically make sense as a power that can miss, and other versions of Tar Patch can't miss.  Epic/Ancillary pools also need to be correctly balanced against each-other, since that's the decision that all players make when they select one pool over another.  Dominator Sleet doesn't need any Accuracy enhanced to work, but Dominator Tar Patch does.

... which kind of is covered in the very next part you didn't quote. If you fix (IE, get rid of) that, the rest doesn't really matter. 😉

[AlwaysAPrice]

Hadn't taken a close look at Dom Dark Mastery yet but this is really goofy. I can understand the power being generally weaker, it's opening tier in the pool so it doesn't require any additional power picks, and a dominator isn't a support AT, so the recharge, radius, and effect strength all being lower than any Dark Miasma version all make some sense to me. Adding a to-hit check does not. At all. The recharge doubling is already enough to push it out of One Slot Wonder territory, it doesn't need to be made multiple enhancement dependent too.

 

Meanwhile comparing Dom Tar Patch & Sleet to their Corruptor secondary versions in Mids gives me further wtfs. Sleet's recharge increase is only 50% while its duration gains 15 seconds, and its debuff strength is identical while Tar Patch's is 25% weaker. Tar Patch does get a duration buff for doms at least: a whole 0.5 seconds. Edit: Can ignore that bit, Mids not as up to date as I thought.

 

It's hard to imagine how this could be WAI and not a situation along the lines of "oops, made a Tar Patch with ToHit checks to weaken it in the hands of the updated Circle of Thorns but accidentally gave that version to doms instead".

Edited April 24 by AlwaysAPrice
striking out bad info

[macskull]

14 minutes ago, AlwaysAPrice said:

Hadn't taken a close look at Dom Dark Mastery yet but this is really goofy. I can understand the power being generally weaker, it's opening tier in the pool so it doesn't require any additional power picks, and a dominator isn't a support AT, so the recharge, radius, and effect strength all being lower than any Dark Miasma version all make some sense to me. Adding a to-hit check does not. At all. The recharge doubling is already enough to push it out of One Slot Wonder territory, it doesn't need to be made multiple enhancement dependent too.

 

Meanwhile comparing Dom Tar Patch & Sleet to their Corruptor secondary versions in Mids gives me further wtfs. Sleet's recharge increase is only 50% while its duration gains 15 seconds, and its debuff strength is identical while Tar Patch's is 25% weaker. Tar Patch does get a duration buff for doms at least: a whole 0.5 seconds.

 

It's hard to imagine how this could be WAI and not a situation along the lines of "oops, made a Tar Patch with ToHit checks to weaken it in the hands of the updated Circle of Thorns but accidentally gave that version to doms instead".

Turns out the Tanker version of this power also has the same limitations, except that one is a level 44 power pick so you’re even less likely to have the extra slots available to give it the attention it needs to perform well.

 

If you’re looking at Mids for data, most of the Page 7 powers changes aren’t on there - Dominator Sleet used to have a 90 second recharge and now it’s 2 minutes along with other nerfs that Sleet as a whole got.

 

Unfortunately, I don’t think this is a case of “oops accidentally gave a critter power to players” since the pet the epic version of Tar Patch spawns is named “Tar_Epic” and it’s flagged to allow enhancements. This seems to be a conscious design decision.

[Luminara]

2 hours ago, macskull said:

I don’t know if the summoned pet inherits accuracy buffs from the caster but I’d assume it doesn’t since many summoned pets don’t.

 

CoD says it does, but... it's not verifiable in-game.  I spent several minutes monitoring a chat tab, with all of the Pet channels, doing nothing but standing there with Darkest Night active and re-applying Tar Patch every time it recharged (49ish seconds), and the only message (in Pet Combat) was that Tar Patch was used ( Tar Patch: You reduce the running speed and damage resistance of Seneschal with a Tar Patch! ).  This character had 45% +Acc and no active +ToHit during the test, and testing was against -1 foes (Portal Corp parking lot), so it wasn't a perfect test, but I spawned Tar Patch six or seven times, a miss roll should have happened at least a few times.

 

A second test with Domination active failed to show the Domination graphic on the Tar Patch pseudo-pet, and I know Domination graphics show on pseudo-pets because I've spend the last few weeks watching the little rainbow bubbles moving around when I was leveling up my Elec/Rad dominator.  I did hear the Domination drop sound when Tar Patch expired, so there's at least that evidence that it's properly inheriting caster boosts and buffs... but without hit roll info, there's no way to be certain.

 

Have to agree with the proposal.  If Tar Patch's -Res were higher than the alternatives, a hit check would be a sensible balance point.  But it isn't, and the hit check whittles down the -Res over time to a lower value.  180s recharge time, 3.3s animation and less -Res?  Might as well just rename it Turd Patch and call it done.

[Ratch_]

20 hours ago, Luminara said:

 

CoD says it does, but... it's not verifiable in-game.

Power Analyzer is your best friend.

 

[macskull]

2 minutes ago, Ratch_ said:

Power Analyzer is your best friend.

 

All that is showing is that the -res is applying to the target, it doesn’t show the actual accuracy or hit rolls for the patch itself so it isn’t really useful for what we’re looking for here.

[Ratch_]

2 minutes ago, macskull said:

All that is showing is that the -res is applying to the target, it doesn’t show the actual accuracy or hit rolls for the patch itself so it isn’t really useful for what we’re looking for here.

I'm hit with darkest night for the duration tanking my tohit. Sure, no hit rolls, but just like how bopper solved the interface issue in the past with collecting data in the manner of seeing ticks you could derive an assumed position of inheriting caster (de)buffs

[Luminara]

14 minutes ago, Ratch_ said:

Power Analyzer is your best friend.

I considered trying that, but Tar Patch has 0.5s pulses, whereas Combat Attrib updates are every... what, 2s?  3s?  Even with the occasional lucky overlap when Tar Patch dropped for half a second and the loss of -Res was displayed, it still wouldn't indicate whether or not Tar Patch was properly inheriting caster boosts and buffs. The margin of error caused by that 1.5-2.5s discrepancy is too large to derive a falsifiable result.