Adeon Hawkwood

Back when Freedom was announced the devs stated that they were looking into the feasibility of doing this (primarily for VIPs who wanted to transfer to Exalted) but that there were major technical issues associated with it. Given that it never appeared I'm guessing that they decided the effort required to make it work without breaking anything was not worth it.

Given the low magnitude of the potential knockback (1.34 which probably won't even get them fully out of the patch) and the low chance of it actually happening (4% with current proc rules, 0.065% with I24 PPM rules) I wouldn't consider that a particularly compelling case for not doing it.

Well currently the Knockdown proc in Overwhelming Force is bugged and Ragnarok is still subject to the 10 second lockout in patch powers. We can't say for sure how PPM will affect it since we don't know the new PPM for those particular procs although we can make some estimates.

Assuming that they don't change the formula that has currently been given for the I24 changes the chance for a given proc to fire in Caltrops will be PPM * 0.006206 (or about 0.6% for every proc per minute) checking once per second. The current SBE version of Ragnarok has 3PPM which should increase to about 4PPM in I24 (depending on whether they round up or not) and let's assume Overwhelming Force has the same PPM (since they currently both have a 20% chance assuming the same PPM makes sense). So each proc will have a 2.48% chance to knock each opponent over once per second with a combined chance of 4.90%. For comparison Earthquake has a higher chance (7%) and has the chance to proc 5 times per second instead of one. So it's not going to be as effective as powers liek that but it's not awful.

Well for Gun Drone and Voltaic Sentinel (I'll cover Spiderlings later) there are pros and cons to this. If the duration was increased then the recharge would almost certainly be increased as well. In a perfect world this isn't a big deal so long as the Duration:Recharge ratio remains the same but in real situations it means that if you lose the pet for some reason (such as the Gun Drone deciding it's a Scrapper or simply you dying causing them to despawn) then the time before you can resummon it increases.

Now I wouldn't mind seeing some changes to both of these powers but not a simple duration increase. First Gun Drone, I think that the current cast time and method is awesome, I have a key bound to Gun Drone so I press it and one second later I have a Drone. I wouldn't mind seeing the recharge reduced to 90 seconds so that it's permanent out of the box (with the understanding that I'd give up the ability to summon multiples for this) but I think 90 seconds is fine in terms of duration, heck a lot of the time I deliberately despawn it before the duration is up to stop it aggroing something anyway.

Similarly for Voltaic Sentinel it already has the same duration and recharge so there isn't a huge benefit. What I would like seeing is the cast time changed from 3 seconds to 1 second and have it simply summon next to you rather than needing to specify a location (same as Gun Drone is now). This would make it much easier to just hit a bind right before combat.

Finally Spiderlings. These are the way they are for a very good balance reason. The pets in all of the Patron power pools have 4 minute durations and 15 minute recharges to limit their uptime. You can (if you want) get them out permanently but it requires a quite high recharge build to do so.

Also given the number of complaints regarding the current implementation of FastSnipe I wouldn't be surprised to see significant changes to it by the time I24 enters Beta.

I agree, the question is how to change it? The simplest solution is to either speed up the waves or have the next wave come a set time after the previous wave is cleared. The problem there is that is a respec trial and one that has a failure mechanism. Since it is a respec trial it needs to be possible to complete it with a very suboptimally built team and the problem with speeding the waves up is that if a team is having trouble faster waves might overwhelm them and the trial has a failure mechanism.

Now the Thorn trial is harder but since it doesn't have a failure mechanism a poor team can at least take several attempts. Personally I'd advocate the same option for the TV trial. Have a couple of small waves when you enter the chamber followed by a relatively easy AV. Short and sweet.

Ok, here's my take on Stone Armor, admittedly coming from someone who doesn't actually like playing melee characters so it's worth exactly what you paid for it .

The core problem is Granite (yeah, I know Captain Obvious but bear with me here). Granite is a Tier 9 Armor power and like a lot of the Tier 9 armor powers it aims to make you nearly invincible but at a strong cost. In most similar powers the cost is limited up-time and a crash at the end. Granite however has permanent up-time but is balanced by decreasing your offense (and mobility but that's less of a concern). Now fundamentally this isn't actually a bad idea, it's an interesting idea compared to other armor sets and helps cement Stone as an extremely tough set.

However the problem is that the actual implementation fails because it renders the rest of the set virtually obsolete. While Granite is active most of the rest of the set can't be used and outside of Granite Stone Armor isn't a particularly great set. It can't seem to decide if it's a resistance set or a defense set which leaves it with rather erratic coverage against different attacks due to the interactions of defense and resistance. This is then compounded by the fact that to achieve full coverage it has to run a total of six toggles (more than any armor set apart from Dark Armor) in a set with no recovery bonuses. Given the choice between six toggles and three most players sensibly opt to just run Granite and only take the other powers as set mules or for use while exemplared.

So how to fix this? I would say that a fix needs to try to do two things. First balance out the performance of the pre-Granite set so that it provides a more balanced set of defenses. Secondly make Granite into a situational power rather than something you always run by default. In other words a Stone Tanker/Brute should feel comfortable using their non-Granite toggles and only turn on Granite if they feel the need to become tougher.

To that end I'd change the set as follows (numbers given are for Tankers):

1. Normalize Rock Armor, Brimstone Armor and Crystal Armor so that they all provide both typed defense and resistances to S/L, F/C or E/NE as appropriate. I'm not sure on values but I think something like 15% defense and 10% resistance would be about right.
2. Remove the Run Speed and Jump Height penalties on Rooted and remove the restriction on having Combat Jumping, Super Speed or Sprint toggled on at the same time. This allows Stone Tankers to at least jump a little bit to get over curbs and deal with in-mission terrain issues and gives them the ability run around in the mission while maintaining the thematic need to remain in reasonable contact with the ground (you can jump a bit and you can run fast but you can't Super Jump or Fly while using Rooted).
3. Add a recovery buff somewhere. Possibly a scaling buff in Mud Pots or alternatively a fixed buff in Rooted and Granite (see below for more on Granite).
4. Now comes the biggy, Granite. Instead of the old effects it works as follows.
   • Granite has no endurance cost and (possibly) applies a recovery buff.
   • Having Granite toggled on provides movement speed debuffs pretty much identical to the old ones and also prevents toggling on Super Speed, Super Jump, Fly and Hover (you can keep Sprint and Combat Jumping though).
   • While Granite is active Rock Armor, Brimstone Armor and Crystal Armor all have their base effects increased to 20% Defense and 50% resistance but each applies a 20% recharge debuff and 10% damage debuff.
   • While Granite is active Minerals has a moderate unenhanceable Psionic resistnace buff added to it (I'm thinking about 40%) but also applies a 20% recharge debuff and 10% damage debuff.
   • Taking Granite grants a new Inherent power called Path of the Earth (or something less lame, I suck at names). This is basically Teleport but the target area has to be on the ground and the animation has you drop straight into the ground and then pop up at the target area with suitable burrowing graphics. Technically it should only be usable while Granite is active but given the lack of vertical movement I'd say let it work outside Granite.

The basic goal here is that a Stone Armor character with Granite, Rock Armor, Brimstone Armor and Crystal Armor should have about the same performance as a Stone Tanker currently gets while in Granite form while also having the option to run Minerals and get even tougher. Outside Granite the set now has a pretty decent set of defenses having defense and resistance to pretty much everything. In Granite those defenses become even better but at the cost of recharge and damage, however since the debuffs are moved from Granite to the individual toggles it becomes possible to reduce the debuffs by toggling off powers that aren't necessary against the current enemy group. The HUGE problem I do see here however is that the set has three toggles that need both resistance and defense slotting which may be to much of a crunch on builds. One option would be to make the resistance portion unenhanceable but increase the values so that you get about 10-15% out of Granite and 70% in Granite but I'm not sure if this would be to good. Another option would be to have Brimstone Armor provide E/NE/F/C resistance while Crystal Armor provides E/NE/F/C Defense thereby making Rock armor the only combined Defense and Resistance toggle, the downside being fewer strategic options for in-Granite toggle juggling.

Of course while this technically only violates the Cottage rule for one power (Granite) it would basically mean every single stone armro character has to redo thier build completely so I can't really see the devs going for it.

In any case that's my $0.02.