UberGuy

Doing that creates a slot count issue.

Today, you could have both powers and have enhanced each with the base slot. If you merge them into one power, you gain two power picks but have to spend an additional slot on the combined power to maintain your previous movement bonuses.

Well, if we can still slot them (and we damn well better be!) you are going to have three more powers but no slots to spare for them.

That's going to be nice on a few of my characters - I'll take stuff I currently don't like one-slot passives or maybe click rezzes I scuttled to make room. I might grab something to mule special IOs in. But overall I don't see slottable inherents moving high-end balance much in general.

Unslottable would be a major downgrade shift in high-end regen and recovery due to loss of the most standard places we slot Miracles, Numina's and Performance Shifter.

Right. And Rest.

Basically I expect this will free up powers but not slots, assuming you have Fitness now and add slots to it.

If that's the case, I'm really looking forward to this.

If they aren't planning to let people slot it, I expect a <bleep>-storm of epic proportions, which is the primary reason I am not expecting such a thing.

I am curious what it means with regard to Swift and Hurdle. Do we get both? I normally only ever take one, so I would get one for free if we get both.

Overall I am curious and nervous at the same time.

It's every time the aura attacks but no more often than once per target per 10s.

So it won't spontaneously "attack" on its own every 10s. It can only attack when the aura does, but it can only contribute on the initial tick and on the next tick at least 10s later, and so on.

Damage procs have an easy to calculate average DPS contribution, at least for single-target attacks. The contribution is simply the damage when the proc goes off times the probability that it goes off.

Let's look at a fairly typical level 1 blast on a level 50 Blaster. Ice Bolt does
62.6 points of damage unenhanced, so roughly twice that near the ED soft "maximum. A standard damage proc does 71.8 damage 20% of the time (to critters). That's an average of +14.4 damage per attack, which is about a 12% increase in the average damage that Ice Bolt causes. If you're talking about a purple proc, that's 107.1 damage with a 33% chance, which is around a 29% increase in damage.

You also tend to spam your smallest attacks the most, because they have the lowest recharge. So you are more likely to get lots of proc activation chances into play, and therefore have a good convergence on the average performance over the course of a play session.

In click AoEs, procs provide the same benefit, but for every foe affected.

Putting a proc in an attack with a huge damage and a correspondingly large recharge isn't going to be as impressive. You're going to increase your damage over time by less in relative terms.

Putting damage procs in damaging toggles has benefit, but how beneficial it is computes slightly differently because it's only allowed to affect targets every 10 seconds. If the damage in the toggle is low, adding a proc may still cause meaningful improvement in average DPS cause by the toggle.

A lot of procs get slotted in attacks for no other reason than that they have to be in order to get the 5th bonus gained by six-slotting a set.

• Example already given: Level 45+ CoT - every boss is -Regen. It's not uncommon for a 45+ Scrapper (or other melee) these days to play on settings where there is a boss nearly every spawn. I find the result to be that I commonly end up with zero regen for the majority of a CoT map unless I'm playing a high defense character.
• Circa-Level 15 CoT: Extremely heavy presence of Spectral <something>s. On hero side, this tends not to be diluted by Nerva Spectrals. Spawns of nothing but Spectral entities are very common. Extremely high lethal/smash resistance and extremely high stacking of -toHit debuffs. Villains get Nervas, which tend to mix the -toHit with slows, which I prefer. At later levels, there are more "fleshy" foes. Ruin Mages tend to reinforce the -toHit debuffing with their own and with force bubbles.
• Level 20-25/30? Arachnos. Extremely heavy robotic presence, with spawns containing nothing but robots quite common. Noticeable and very painful if you deal mostly Psi damage.
• Banished Pantheon - every minion has very high negative and Psi damage resistance.
• My favorite: Longbow, level 15-50. Lethal/Smash resistance, all the time. -Defense debuffs, all the time.

The point is that even when there might be many ways in which these foes may be varied, there are ofen some ways, usually their resistances and sometimes their debuffs, that are very "monochromatic". If your character happens to align with this, it becomes highly noticeable. The fact that the spawns may be doing an interesting variety of other things takes a back seat to the fact that suddenly they're taking a less damage than you're accustomed to dealing, dealing you more damage-over-time than you're accustomed to taking*, or consistently doing something to you that's bad for how your character is built. When this state of affairs with a mob faction spans 5-10 level ranges (or basically never goes away), I get pretty tired of dealing with it.

In my opinion, level 30+ Arachnos are one of the most difficulty NPC factions to fight in the game, because they do lots of different annoying things. But because they do really do lots of different annoying things, how dangerous they are to any given character of mine varies widely from spawn to spawn, depending on its composition. This is not the case when I face, say, Freakshow, Banished Pantheon or Longbow. (Longbow bosses have a nice variety, but their minions and LTs are amazingly uniform, almost literally).

Basically I'd love to see more factions do more different things or have more different protections so that a given character didn't risk being so consistently affected by them. Even Arachnos, IMO, needs to be cleaned up in the 20s.

* I used to include how some sets have pervasive weakness to Psi damage in this, but these days I find that it's less of a problem, due to various changes in powers and powersets, plus IOs. It used to affect Invuln and Fire Armor a lot, and they're certainly still weak to Psi, but the degree is such that I usually find it manageable, even facing strong Psi foes, like Carnie bosses (which are certainly common in Carnie missions and arcs.)

I think this reality interacts badly, at least in some cases, with the design of enemy groups. We still have a few groups that have, in my not-so-humble opinion, too much homogeneity. Sometimes they are just always highly homogeneous, and sometimes only in certain level ranges. That means that if you run a mission or story arc against those foes (at least in some level ranges) you are faced with either high stacking of the same effects (in the case of pervasive but smaller debuffs) or fairly consistent reapplication (in the case of less frequent but very strong debuffs). For an example pertinent to the -Regen discussion, consider level 45+ Circle of Thorns, where every boss is a Death Mage.

This isn't just an annoyance for debuffs, either. It can also apply to things like their resistances (when they happen to be highly resistant to your attacks), their damage types (when they happen to deal what you are particularly weak against) or their use of some types of mezzes.

This isn't necessarily a pure balance issue, assuming it can be called a balance issue at all. After all, one could always try to forgo facing those foes. For me it's an unpleasant interaction between the more numerical analysis of performance and the desire to experience content or the RP notion of feeling like my characters are hiding from foes they're weak against.

As obnoxious as foes like the Tsoo and Arachnos can be at times, I usually feel like I can pick out particularly obnoxious foes in their ranks. They aren't all uniformly obnoxious to me. I like that, because it allows/forces me to make important tactical decisions as I go if I want to succeed. This is in contrast with how I sometimes feel about more homogeneous foes, where I feel compelled towards a more up-front, binary choice of whether avoid and entire enemy faction or not.

Sorry for the moderate thread-jack there. I found the rest of your post quite interesting, but only had something specific to say on the part quoted above.

This may have a limited relationship or even nothing at all to do with whether the player powers are on. This is likely cause by the mere presence of large numbers of players, and possibly their pets (which, as mentioned are not suppressed). It's common for folks with lowband internet connections, which suffer when there are lots of updates from the server about character and critter movements, etc.

This is a function of how close you are to the characters and critters in question. Since a lot of folks congregate at the markets, it's natural that you experience this as you approach.

Unless the characters in the WW are actively cycling through new powers, their powers likely make this only marginally worse. Contrast what you get if you've ever shown up at, say, a Hamidon raid, with what happens when the same players are piled in the center of the zone beating on Hamidon. This means that power suppression is not likely to get rid of this problem for you. Instead, you want to go to a different market - one that's less-used.

If you find a particular market convenient and want to use it because of that, you've probably hit upon why there are other people congregating there.

Yep, and as a boss, to answer the up-thread question.

Thanks. I wouldn't have thought about that being the problem, but I saw the patch note about this for AE critters.

Which makes me wonder - did they intend to remove interruptability from all critter powers that were interruptable? Granted, I'm not sure a player is ever going to give and NPC a chance to execute an interruptable AS or snipe, but it still surprised me, since the seemingly related patch note specified AE critters.

Oh, I've killed him plenty, but I was doing it with melee characters and ones that could lock him down fairly effectively to boot. This time he was an ambush against a Corruptor. I also didn't expect how he approached, which was to enter the room on a platform above me and then paradrop right on my head (whereupon he executed me with prejudice).

Look carefully at the time stamps. He executed Assassin's Claw in approximately one second. Based on how it went in combat, I'm pretty sure it was less than that. In fact, I only saw him execute what looked like one attack.

Notably, the character I was on has about 1370 HP. So from my perspective, I was effectively one shotted by something that bypasses the one-shot code. (Not that there aren't many examples of this, but still.)

So... bug? Side effect of the recent AE critter change removing interruptibility from AE critter powers? Lingering case where his activation time is broken because he was given an uninterruptable AS? Or ridiculous intentional power? Totally dead people want to know.

I don't know, I don't have a big problem with them since the MoG improvements. I now consider my Regens my best Scrappers for opposing them.

Master Illusionists I can pretty much out-heal, even with their summoned friends. The Dark Servants are annoying, but not specifically dangerous.

Dark Ring Mistresses used to be a big problem for me, because they would always land Mask of Vitiation on me. But now I've learned to run in to start beating on them, let them use a couple of powers, and then pop MoG. Generally they'll try to use Mask on me while MoG is running, and generally they'll miss. Unless something unusual is going on, I'll have a +2 or +3 Mistress down before she recharges the Mask for a second use.

Edit: The above assumes one boss. Two (or more!) DRMs is a pretty serious problem for any character I have. I can deal with two MIs, but I usually have to wait for their mass of pets to expire - especially the Dark Servants.

I can grok that, but bear in mind that it's just not compatible with the notion of tweaking out a Regen for max performance. I don't think you ever said it was, so please know I'm not arguing with you. I'm just trying to point out to all reading that there's sort of two divergent goals going on in discussion here - skipping the sorta "meh" powers to make room for stuff that helps you live longer, and doing things like taking powers to learn first hand which ones are "meh".

Regen pairs well with lots of additional mitigation, or fast AoE killing. I dive into large spawns and use Regen's clicks to recover from or mitigation the alpha strike. Then I have to defeat my foes before I either run out of additional clicks to use, or I have to slow down their net DPS enough that I can get my clicks back before I die.

Sword sets provide excellent mitigation. Dark Melee can as well, though not so effectively against large spawns (but Siphon Life is really powerful). Fire Melee, Electric Melee, Spines, Claws and, to a lesser extent, Dual Blades all have good AoE kill potential. You can use these sets to really hose the minions in a large spawn if you can cluster them for your cones and PBAoEs.

Martial Arts is heavily single-target focused. It provides some decent but not amazing mitigation. In a crowd, it's mitigation is dependent on Dragon's Tail to keep stuff off its feet, and its stuns to disable singular annoying foes. The stun mitigation used to be basically non-existent in most builds before this issue. Now I consider it quite high, but it's still limited to a couple of opponents at a time.

So that's probably why you feel more squishy pairing Regen with MA.