Focused Feedback: Powerset - Radiation Armor

[The Curator]

---

Radiation Armor

 Ground Zero

• The offensive components of this power now can only hit 16 foes.
• Power still can hit up to 255 allies.

 

 Radiation Therapy

• This power now has Adaptive Recharge. It has a base recharge of 25 seconds, and each affected foe will increase the recharge by varying amounts to a maximum total of 90 seconds. First target adds 20 seconds, each additional target adds recharge proportionate to it's buff strength.
• Every subsequent target will yield a 30% weaker effect than the previous target
• Accuracy lowered from 3x to 1.2
• Heal per enemy increased from scale 2.2% to scale 11%.
• Heal with no enemy in range lowered from scale 11% to scale 6%
• Total maximum heal with all targets increased from 33% to 38%
• Regeneration buff reduced from +100% to 50%, duration reduced from 60s to 45s
• Fixed power description showing wrong adaptive recharge numbers.
• Fixed a bug where this decay was not working as intended.

 

 Meltdown

• Power now has a visual indicator that the power is going to crash in the next 10 seconds.

 

Quote

Design Notes:

Ground Zero is a power that should had never been released in its current form. It's high cap was set so it could reliably cover allies and still be able to hit some foes. This ideally should had been split into two independent components when finalizing the set, but was not done due to how hard it was to create such powers at that time. Making an armor power affect more enemies than even incarnate nukes was never the intended goal. These days we have new tools to properly split these components without the legacy headaches. We should had done this long ago, but that does not give the power a pass. 

 

Radiation Therapy is another power that has other issues. It does too many things at once. The original version left by the devs never had such a high accuracy, nor did it grant endurance to the caster. These are things that were added later in an experiment and resulted in the power being too overloaded. The accuracy was never meant to be increased to 3, but to 1.13 (would had resulted in about 85% acc against even level foes). The original power, as left by the dev team, had an accuracy of 1.0x. We are compromising with 1.2 in this pass, but at 3x we may as well make the power auto hit. Such an incarnation would lose access to accurate healing enhancement sets. 

 

Despite this we still feel the power does a lot for it the set out of a single power, and that should be reflected somehow, either by removing effects or increasing recharge. Simply increasing recharge did not seem like a good compromise since it would make the power way less useful in boss encounters so decided to use the new Adaptive Recharge technique with the power. This means the power has a very low recharge that scales with it's usage. At maximum saturation, the power will have a higher recharge than it does currently live, but with fewer foes around the power will recharge much faster up to the point where 1v1 fights the player will be able to continually use the power. The power can now be used anywhere between every 25 seconds and 90 seconds depending on how many enemies (if any) were in range.

 

We understand nerfs are never popular, but sometimes we need to tone some sets down.

 

---

 

[arcane]

Can we please have a developer weigh in on the elephant in the room not mentioned by the patch notes? How will PPM interact with Adaptive Recharge?

[macskull]

22 minutes ago, arcane said:

Can we please have a developer weigh in on the elephant in the room not mentioned by the patch notes? How will PPM interact with Adaptive Recharge?

Not a dev but when I asked this exact question in closed beta the response was that proc rates use the base recharge of the power. This means for powers with adaptive recharge they’ll always use the shortest possible recharge time regardless of how long the power actually takes to recharge. Adaptive recharge ends up being an apparent buff for a lot of powers that has the side effect of effectively being a pretty huge proc nerf.

 

Also while I’m here, can we get Ground Zero’s animation sped up? 3 seconds is way too long for what it does now.

[Player-1]

24 minutes ago, arcane said:

Can we please have a developer weigh in on the elephant in the room not mentioned by the patch notes? How will PPM interact with Adaptive Recharge?

 

PPM interacts with the base recharge value. Adaptive recharge takes effect immediately  after the power activates. 

[ScarySai]

Rad armor's one of my favorite sets, so here we go.

 

Rad's weakness is it's sustainability in a fight, largely due to the long cds between your clicks, and a total lack of debuff protection. 

 

1: Why is the max recharge for therapy longer on top of the other nerfs piled on to it? The adaptive recharge change doesn't really make sense to me, unless it was specifically to target procs.

 

2: Why is ground zero's cast time still so slow? It should be faster now that it's a normal aoe attack.

 

You claim rad therapy did too much at once, but other armor sets, especially now, have a lot more going for them than rad does. So I question if this was a relic of an earlier build that just never got adjusted.

[Monkerlotus]

ground zero could lose its heal for all i care but 90seconds excessive on recharge, rad therapy is fine, i dont see the need to change it, compared to my other melee including my bio armor who can toggle between unstopple force and immovable object at will.

Edited Tuesday at 07:31 PM by Monkerlotus

[Shin Magmus]

     Well at least I can 5-slot Panacea into Rad Therapy now and get more Recharge for my other powers on my Scrapper... y'know, cus the damage procs are hilariously worthless in it now.  For characters who heavily relied on it as a source of AoE dmg, that stings.  The Ground Zero nerf just normalizes it with every other power in the game, which is only really going to severely affect AE farms with extreme target saturation.  Sucks for them, but they can roll up another farmer in no time.

[Maelwys]

1 hour ago, Shin Magmus said:

cus the damage procs are hilariously worthless in it now

3.5PPM procs ought to have gone from 90% (@60s base rech) to... 46.72% (@25s base recharge)...
So yeah about half the previous damage, on average; but still a fairly big radius and reasonable target cap.

Personally I'll probably keep the existing 4x procs; and swap the Lv50+5 Heal IO to a Lv53 Acc/Heal HO; so something like this (worst-case with 90s elongated recharge)


(that's a Touch of the Nictus Lv50+5 Heal IO to nab the 2-piece set bonus)

The lessened Regeneration buff is annoying (it means my Scrapper won't quite hit 50 HP/Sec any more!) but the Heal is worth far more if there are only 1-2 enemies nearby.
The lessened Accuracy is almost ignorable at endgame; but might hurt whilst levelling up.

All-round a nerf, but manageable.

However yes, lower the activation time on Ground Zero; please.
It's not a meganuke any more; so it doesn't need to feel like we're waiting for Armageddon to arrive.

[csr]

On 5/26/2025 at 5:00 AM, The Curator said:

---

Radiation Armor

 

 Radiation Therapy

• This power now has Adaptive Recharge. It has a base recharge of 25 seconds, and each affected foe will increase the recharge by varying amounts to a maximum total of 90 seconds. First target adds 20 seconds, each additional target adds recharge proportionate to it's buff strength.
• Every subsequent target will yield a 30% weaker effect than the previous target
• Base -Regeneration Res is now flat 25% per target for all ATs

 

The -Regen is still -150% on the Tanker I tested.

 

The heal (again on a Tanker) is 70% of the first target on all subsequent targets.  Not X, then 0.7X, then 0.49X and so on.  The END gain scales the same as the heal.

[Kaika]

Having already tested it, I can confirm it's still very worth it to proc bomb if that's your thing, it hits for very respectable damage with 4 procs and no recharge. It's just no longer a pocket nuke that heals/recovers end. Rad kinda needed a nerf and honestly this feels rather well directed. I do agree though ground zero could use a slight reduction in it's activation time here, but I feel the set isn't exactly hurting for AoE presence.

[Heatstroke]

23 hours ago, macskull said:

 

 

Also while I’m here, can we get Ground Zero’s animation sped up? 3 seconds is way too long for what it does now.

 

 

THIS.. 100%,, THIS

[ScarySai]

I'm gonna just say that the nerfs to rad make absolutely no sense with what every other armor set in this patch got. If anything, it should be buffed.

 

This, coercive and plant are the biggest L changes in the patch by far.

 

At least speed up ground zero, bare minimum.

Edited yesterday at 02:47 PM by ScarySai

[Maelwys]

17 hours ago, Maelwys said:

The lessened Regeneration buff is annoying (it means my Scrapper won't quite hit 50 HP/Sec any more!) but the Heal is worth far more if there are only 1-2 enemies nearby.

I got around to testing Radiation Therapy a bit more:
Below figures are for ED-capped Healing (2x Lv50+5 Heal IOs) and no local recharge (but 65% Global Recharge).

Live with nobody nearby:

Brainstorm with nobody nearby:

That's 7.5 End vs 5 End; 346.15 Health vs 157.34 Health (owch!)

It looks like the new version doesn't count yourself as a hit any longer; so you're missing an extra tick compared to what's on live.
So "Heal with no enemy in range lowered from scale 11% to scale 6%" is not accurate as it does not include the 57.69 "hit" on myself in the above screenshot.
In relative terms this is actually more like moving from scale 13.2% to scale 6%

Although to be fair; it recharges a lot faster (~11 sec rather than ~37 in my build) so over time it will still return more HP than before.

- - - - - - - - - -

Live with 3 foes nearby:

Brainstorm with 3 foes nearby:

That's 15 End vs 23.61 End; 519.22 Health vs 970.25 Health
And it also recharges a bit faster (~31 sec rather than ~37 in my build).
The Regeneration is cut in half; for ~8HP/Sec rather than ~16... which when factored in still doesn't catch up to the new figures.
So Brainstorm is the clear winner here for HP and Endurance recovery; and damage procs are still kicking in at about half the previous rate.
 

Edited yesterday at 03:13 PM by Maelwys

[csr]

On 5/26/2025 at 5:00 AM, The Curator said:

---

Radiation Armor

 Radiation Therapy

• This power now has Adaptive Recharge. It has a base recharge of 25 seconds, and each affected foe will increase the recharge by varying amounts to a maximum total of 90 seconds. First target adds 20 seconds, each additional target adds recharge proportionate to it's buff strength.

---

 

The "Notes" in the character creation screen say 20s and 18.5s for the adaptive recharge times instead of 25s/20s.  This is for all melee ATs.