page 3 [OPEN BETA] Patch Notes for December 19th, 2025

[Glacier Peak]

On 12/19/2025 at 12:03 PM, The Curator said:

Shield Defense

• One With The Shield
  • (PvE Only) Recharge lowered to 160s
  • (PvE Only) Duration reduced from 120s to 40s
  • (PvE Only) Crash eliminated 
  • Now grants 25% Res(-end and -recovery)
  • Now grants +20% Absorb (enhanceable) for 40s
  • Now executes a PBAoE shield slam on activation doing minor AoE damage and knocking down some foes around you

I would've liked to see the One with the Shield change continue to be tested iteratively. It was really rounding out nicely during previous testing - it could've used a bit longer duration (60 seconds sweet spot IMO), but it was starting to look like a great change for the power and powerset as a whole.

[Riverdusk]

6 hours ago, DarknessEternal said:

People keep talking about Super Strength and Rage, but all I can hear is "it's time to fix damage procs."

 

Changing Super Strength/Rage without changing damage procs would be like changing the tires but not putting gas in the car.

 

Because damage procs are a massive system that affects every AT in the game and rage is a single power in a single powerset.   An easy example, without procs I'd abandon pretty much every controller I have in the entire game unless there were other adjustments to the AT.

[Erratic1]

2 hours ago, kelika2 said:

And two, I know you probably maybe kinda played SS at a low level at some point as a tanker.

 

My longtime signature character was my SS/Bio Brute, who seemingly is going to be nerfed on both sides. Should UM make it in, I have a SS/WP replacement planned.

[Psi-bolt]

43 minutes ago, Riverdusk said:

 

Because damage procs are a massive system that affects every AT in the game and rage is a single power in a single powerset.   An easy example, without procs I'd abandon pretty much every controller I have in the entire game unless there were other adjustments to the AT.

 

I agree with you and I think if they did finally address procs in some way that they would have to change the ATs with very lower damage modifiers like Controllers.   Probably other changes too but increasing their ranged/melee modifier would be a minimum.

[Voltor]

 

Here's my ideas

 

1. Don't change rage as many won't be happy with the changes

 

2. Restore Unleashed Might as the alternative thus SS players can choose.

 

3. Release the update to live.

 

4. Do more research on how to adjust/improve SS's attack powers on beta

[Myrmidon]

Let me know when we are at Release Candidate. Nothing matters until then at this point.

[Myrmidon]

1 hour ago, Voltor said:

 

Here's my ideas

 

1. Don't change rage as many won't be happy with the changes

 

2. Restore Unleashed Might as the alternative thus SS players can choose.

 

3. Release the update to live.

 

4. Do more research on how to adjust/improve SS's attack powers on beta

One hundred times this.

[Arc-Mage]

On 12/20/2025 at 11:00 AM, Faultline said:

 

Like I said, we are supposed to be on break. I wasn't even planning to push another patch out until January. We have some developers who are workaholics and don't know when to stop.

AI is our friend. It also isn't. 

[Shin Magmus]

15 hours ago, Glacier Peak said:

I would've liked to see the One with the Shield change continue to be tested iteratively. It was really rounding out nicely during previous testing - it could've used a bit longer duration (60 seconds sweet spot IMO), but it was starting to look like a great change for the power and powerset as a whole.

   Devs look, more feedback regarding a minimum duration of 60s for the T9 powers: take this to heart.  My main criticism was also that 30s or 40s durations feel like trash on the T9s.  For fuck's sake, Meltdown with a 30s duration meant that its needlessly slow cast time was over 10% of its effective buff duration: yikes!  When you revisit T9s, 60s should be the absolute minimum for all of them but MoG.

[FupDup]

2 hours ago, Shin Magmus said:

   Devs look, more feedback regarding a minimum duration of 60s for the T9 powers: take this to heart.  My main criticism was also that 30s or 40s durations feel like trash on the T9s.  For fuck's sake, Meltdown with a 30s duration meant that its needlessly slow cast time was over 10% of its effective buff duration: yikes!  When you revisit T9s, 60s should be the absolute minimum for all of them but MoG.

I mean...a few others like Bastion, Geode, and Surge of Power get away with 30s because of the different circumstances surrounding their kits.

 

But yeah, the feedback from the start has been in very consistent agreement that 30s is just too short in most cases. 

[Black_Assassin]

On 12/22/2025 at 2:25 PM, DarknessEternal said:

but all I can hear is "it's time to fix damage procs."

 

I'm interested to know how procs are "broken" tbh. I hear this kind of sentiment a lot but there's nothing beyond that anywhere on the forums that actually lays it out. 

[Black_Assassin]

On 12/19/2025 at 7:03 PM, The Curator said:

Psionic Mastery > World of Confusion (damage restricted to 8ft)

 

 

Will this increase in radius of the non-damage portion of the toggle lower the proc rates of said power? Looks like 39.5% proc rate vs 27.9% proc rate in coersive persuasion for 8ft vs 15ft toggles. 

[lemming]

17 minutes ago, Black_Assassin said:

I'm interested to know how procs are "broken" tbh. I hear this kind of sentiment a lot but there's nothing beyond that anywhere on the forums that actually lays it out. 

Just me spitballing, but I think procs were originally intended to be a bonus, not the main source of damage.   How to make that work is probably what the debate with the power team is.

[Black_Assassin]

It's not so much that extra damage is being chased here but the extra mag 3 confuse cloud. 

 

If the proc rates are affected then the question is: does the effective doubling of the area coverage constitute a net buff or a net nerf when you consider the lower proc rates will essentially mean the proc goes from firing (on a 16 man spawn) on 6.4 $targets vs 4.5 $targets. 

 

That confuse mag cloud can really help spread mag about a group if they are tightly clustered on you for the 8ft radius to be leveraged, but obviously you need much less positional awareness with a 15ft toggle but the mag spreading is diminished. 

 

🤷🤷🤷🤷

[Captain Citadel]

20 minutes ago, Black_Assassin said:

I'm interested to know how procs are "broken" tbh. I hear this kind of sentiment a lot but there's nothing beyond that anywhere on the forums that actually lays it out. 

IMO the reason they're "broken" is that stacking them on a single power is the best way to increase damage now, and for most of the game's life they did not exist, because we didn't have IO sets. Before IO sets, we slotted enhancements for their passive effects to make the power better. You put some combination of damage, accuracy, recharge, and endurance reduction on all your attack powers. Now, we use Incarnates and set bonuses on other powers to get global accuracy/recharge/endurance reduction, and just stack procs on all our attacks for raw damage. The attack power itself becomes largely irrelevant, we're stacking external damage onto it and getting all our DPS that way.

It just doesn't feel good. This isn't how the game was broadly designed for most of its existence. I would rather get my character's power from their powers, not throw a punch with Super Strength and watch the target go down from a combination of every element in the game except Smashing damage. At that point it's like my character has no powers, they're getting everything from items, if that makes sense.

[Black_Assassin]

On 12/19/2025 at 7:03 PM, The Curator said:

 

Edited Tuesday at 05:43 PM by Black_Assassin

[Black_Assassin]

18 minutes ago, Captain Citadel said:

most of the game's life they did not exist, because we didn't have IO sets

 According to the wiki IOs came back in i9 which was 2007, so we had normal SOs for 3 years before IOs came along, and then IOs until sunset circa end of 2012. So really IOs have been around an awful lot longer than you think. 

 

Procs back then were just flat rates. 20% I think was the equivalent of the current 3.5ppm ones but I could be wrong. 

 

Then PPM changes was set to come out in i24 but then game closed so it wasn't until HC that we got it AFAIK. Well the super secret server, but that's beside the point. 

 

26 minutes ago, Captain Citadel said:

The attack power itself becomes largely irrelevant, we're stacking external damage onto it and getting all our DPS that way.

 

That's partly true, cannot fully refute that. The case in points are defenders and scrappers. Defenders really don't benefit much from slotting damage into their powers, the scalar is weak and it just doesn't do an awful lot. Scrapper damage on the other hand benefits quite a lot from max ED dam. 

 

Defender damage can be really supported by lots of damage procs, scrapper damage is lower on 6 damage proc slotting than 2 acc/dam and 4 procs. 

 

29 minutes ago, Captain Citadel said:

This isn't how the game was broadly designed for most of its existence.

 

That's fair. For most of the existence of IOs, procs were Bob Ross' happy little accidents that were nice to go off when they did. They didn't bend the damage curves much since they were random and either did or didn't happen. 

 

The PPM changes were part of i24, which was the patch to "fix all things". So one assumes that PPM was they way the OG devs wanted the game to go in. We have that system now, albeit in a slightly nerfed format.

 

32 minutes ago, Captain Citadel said:

It just doesn't feel good.

 

32 minutes ago, Captain Citadel said:

At that point it's like my character has no powers, they're getting everything from items, if that makes sense.

 

I do appreciate this point you are making though. I guess we are talking here about vibes and concept and, to some extend, head cannon/RP/immersion. That's never been my cup of tea, for me procs = more orange numbers exploding above my targets and therefore my dopamine addicted monkey brain likes them. 

 

Would procs be "fixed" or "less broken" for you if their damage and the power damage was all combined into 1 single number over a targets head purely for the purposes of decluttering visuals? (it would have no impact on damage logs) 

 

Reading the wiki, it does seem like the original devs wanted to do something with procs and to have them go off with a larger chance in longer recharge powers. So really they are part of the game and we are expected to use them. We now have that, but as always in games the player base finds the best ways to utilise in game systems and maximise their outputs. 

 

So now we have a situation where everything that can most effectively utilise damage procs has been or is in the process of being nerfed/removed/neutered. Which is a shame imo, but there needs to be a line drawn somewhere I guess? But then...we are super heroes, why shouldn't we be strong? 

 

Rambles from me, but I do welcome others views on it. It's an interesting subject. 

 

[arcane]

1 hour ago, Black_Assassin said:

 

I'm interested to know how procs are "broken" tbh. I hear this kind of sentiment a lot but there's nothing beyond that anywhere on the forums that actually lays it out. 

they aren’t broken except in niche cases

[Captain Citadel]

16 minutes ago, Black_Assassin said:

According to the wiki IOs came back in i9 which was 2007, so we had normal SOs for 3 years before IOs came along, and then IOs until sunset circa end of 2012. So really IOs have been around an awful lot longer than you think.

My mistake. I don't think I could afford IOs back in the day because I had no idea how to leverage various systems to make lots of influence, or how to make an AE farming character, so I misremembered because I was using SOs up until the point I left the game and had my account hacked and deleted in my absence. I tried starting again when Going Rogue came out but couldn't run the game on the computer I had and quit for good not long after, until HC launched.

I guess it would be fairer to say that proc-bomb builds weren't a thing for most of the game's life. I think they should be eliminated, personally. However I understand this would have a tremendously negative impact on Defenders and other ATs with abysmally low damage scalars, so I would only support taking procs back to their old "Bob Ross version" after we solved that problem.

I just feel like because procs are part of set bonuses and 6-slotting powers was fairly common back in the day, the old devs seemed to not have intended that we should be stacking procs, that they would be extra bits of damage rather than our actual powers being the extra bit of damage. I know i24 was "in-house" from the end of the game's original run, but is it possible they hadn't realized proc-bombing would be a thing, and that they might've reconsidered their approach once it had gone live? IIRC it was only on the test server at the time.

 

23 minutes ago, Black_Assassin said:

Would procs be "fixed" or "less broken" for you if their damage and the power damage was all combined into 1 single number over a targets head purely for the purposes of decluttering visuals? (it would have no impact on damage logs)

I don't think this would fix the underlying problem of "all our damage comes from procs and not powers" and for me it's not just an immersion or RP thing. Decluttering the overhead numbers is always a good idea for readability, but that's way down the list of issues for me personally. It's a build problem for me. I like leveraging set bonuses and Incarnate powers to make my Tanker the best at tanking he can possibly be. I build all my characters like that, but it feels like the current "culture" of proc-bomb builds means I'm expected to build every AT for maximum damage, not maximum role performance, if that makes sense. I like making my powers stronger, whatever those powers are designed to do. I don't like having to proc-load all my damage powers and then turn all my other powers into set mules for the global stats I'm neglecting by not building my damage powers to be better powers. That doesn't make me feel super, that makes me feel like I'm a fake superhero who's using performance-enhancing drugs, lmao.

[aethereal]

Procs were very different during the entire original lifespan of the game, as the PPM system never made it live until the secret post-shutdown server.  They were, to my understanding, sometimes very valuable!  But in different powers than today.

 

I think the PPM system was a bad mistake.  There are a ton of problems with it.  But it's just integral to the way the game works today, and the way it has worked for years now.  I don't think they can effectively replace the PPM system now.  What they're doing, I think, is dialing back some of the prominence of procs in specific cases with adaptive recharge, additional base damage scale (eg new power siphon), adjusting some cascading proc rules (carrion creepers, irradiated ground), and potentially adding internal cooldowns.

 

And I think that reasonably, that's the only viable way to do it at this point.

[FupDup]

The PPM system sucks pretty bad (namely the slotted recharge penalty) but I don't think that procs are an issue in and of themselves. I think the broader issue is that our building system gives us procs as the only method of affecting our upper limits. Every other type of building goal, like defense slotting, just raises your minimum floor but doesn't affect your maximum ceiling in that attribute. Procs are the only way to increase your max power, so procs became the best way to build. It's not their fault that the system was so limited. 

 

That being said, trying to expand that system is just not feasible for a game this old, like at all. I would therefore lean on the "proc boosting" mechanic seen in Cupid's Crush as a bandaid to try to add more spice to set-slotting. 

 

There should also be a lot more non-damage utility type procs, and some categories like Stuns and Sleeps are desperately underserved while Holds are completely fucking bloated with choices. 

[Captain Citadel]

7 minutes ago, aethereal said:

Procs were very different during the entire original lifespan of the game, as the PPM system never made it live until the secret post-shutdown server.  They were, to my understanding, sometimes very valuable!  But in different powers than today.

 

I think the PPM system was a bad mistake.  There are a ton of problems with it.  But it's just integral to the way the game works today, and the way it has worked for years now.  I don't think they can effectively replace the PPM system now.  What they're doing, I think, is dialing back some of the prominence of procs in specific cases with adaptive recharge, additional base damage scale (eg new power siphon), adjusting some cascading proc rules (carrion creepers, irradiated ground), and potentially adding internal cooldowns.

 

And I think that reasonably, that's the only viable way to do it at this point.

What if they limited the number of damage procs a power could slot, or turned procs into an actual set bonus instead of letting them be equipped by themselves with no set investment at all?

[arcane]

Think some people are trying to obfuscate here like that’s going to work. Procs themselves aren’t a problem. Powers with stats that conveniently line up a little too perfectly with the PPM system are the only problem. We don’t need to throw out Controllers’ ability to do damage too just because you’re upset that Radiation Therapy is no longer a 1 second animation nuke on a short recharge. 
 

I’m normally the last person to lose my mind over common sense nerfs, but the way some of you are asking for much broader sweeping nerfs instead of targeted nerfs just because you’re bitter about the state of procs is a little crazy IMO. Be careful what you wish for. Having to respec every single character you have over one patch could still be on the table.

[WindDemon21]

2 hours ago, Black_Assassin said:

 

 

Will this increase in radius of the non-damage portion of the toggle lower the proc rates of said power? Looks like 39.5% proc rate vs 27.9% proc rate in coersive persuasion for 8ft vs 15ft toggles. 

While we're at it either way can we also please fix its proc rate to every 2s, not every 4...

[Coyote]

Since damage is king at high levels, it makes sense that players build towards that end... I'd rather proc-bomb an AoE Stun into a 240-damage blast with long recharge, than into a better Stun, because nobody cares if minions/lieutenants are Stunned for 15 seconds instead of, when they won't live to see the end of the Stun anyhow. If you try to nerf damage procs (other procs aren't a problem), in order to force players to slot powers "as they were originally intended", then you'll have even more of a balance issue where low-damage ATs are of little use on teams at high levels other than for their buffing.

 

I don't have many Blaster builds that slot procs before slotting up damage, because the damage done by Blaster attacks are high enough compared to proc damage... whereas Controllers and Defenders (and MMs) will try to put in as many procs as they can squeeze rather than enhancing relatively weak base damage. Is this actually a problem, or actually a solution to the problem where we have low-damage ATs that feel irrelevant in a game of buffs and damage?
My Dom builds also don't slot up many proc bombs.... yeah, they're nice. And Doms also like global recharge, and are squishy enough to want some +Defense set bonuses. Hard to combine those with a lot of proc-bombing.

 

Overall, over most powers, I don't see a major issue. Specific powers like Creepers that, for various design reasons, activated procs at a much higher rate per minute than the proc was balanced for, can be nerfed for how procs work with them. That feels more appropriate to me.