Adeon Hawkwood

Buff Bot was a poor word choice on my part since the term has so many negative connotations.

However, I believe that the term is actually accurate to the play style imposed by those powers. To get full use from the shields I have to, every four minutes, do the following actions:
1. Select team mate
2. Cast first shield
3. Cast second shield
4. GOTO 1

This is something that would be trivial for a bot program to do (obviously actually making one to do it would be a violation of the EULA) so during that portion of the game I am effectively doing the work of a bot. How is that engaging gameplay?

With every other non-toggle/pet power in the game there are critical choices to be made regarding when to use the power and who to use it on. To me this is what constitutes engaging gameplay, having to make decisions about how to use the power. The short recharge buffs fail that test. There might, under certain circumstances, be a decision to not use the powers at all but for the most part endurance and casting time are readily available enough that the core gameplay for those powers comes down to: maintain them on all teammates.

This is one of the things that bugs me whenever this topic comes up. People seem to take it for granted that changing the buffs to AoE would require a nerf to end/recharge/something and I just do not buy it. The only one I see that would need nerfing in that situation is Speed Boost but that's only because I think that the current version of Speed Boost should be nerfed anyway (which is a completely different and even more controversial topic).

Suppose you took the current powers (lets say for Force Field) and changed it from a single target buff to an AoE team buff that doesn't affect the caster (yes, I said team, more on this later) without changing anything else. Would it break the game? From the point of view of your teammates nothing changes, they still have the shields up with the same power level and need to come back to you every 4 minutes to refresh them. From your point if view what changes is that you now spend 4.14 seconds and 15.6 endurance every 4 minutes refreshing the shields instead of 28.98 seconds and 109.2 endurance. Yes, it does seem like a significant amount but can you really tell me, with a straight face that the game is so tightly balanced that this change to, essentially, activation time and endurance cost of a power you cast every four minutes will really break the balance?

Similarly for recharge there is no benefit to casting the power multiple times on the same character, it just refreshes the duration. Since you can't effectively cast the power more than once every four minutes anyway does it matter if the power recharges quickly?

To me the balance objective of these powers should be:
If you are teamed with a person who has the power and are located in the same general area as them you should get the benefit, if you leave the team or move to far away from the power owner for to long the benefit expires.

The current powers meet that objective and changing them to a team based non-caster affecting AoE would not change the balance with regards to that objective. Now, this is costing the powers some flexibility in a league based environment but I do not think that is necessarily a bad thing. There is a line drawn between team buffs and league buffs and adding these to the team buff side encourages more care with how different characters are distributed through the league (i.e. don't but all of your bubblers on the same team).

Now there are two specific types of other buff to consider: Mez Protection Buffs and Speed Boost

Mez protection buffs I think are ok as is. The design intent for them seems to be reactive use to break a mez on an ally and they seem well balanced for that. Changing them to AoE would probably not be to bad (especially considering the existence of Clarion) but it is probably not needed.

Speed Boost is a special case. I suspect the design intent was to use it re-actively to help a friend who got hit by a heavy debuff but the problem is it is way to good for what it does. Personally I'd do the following:
1. Make it a non-caster AoE and increase duration to 4 minutes (for the reasons discussed above)
2. Remove the movement increase (I like the movement boost but it causes problems for a lot of people)
3. Decrease the recharge bonus to +25%

I'd honestly advocate doing number 3 even if the first 2 items were not done. I really feel that Speed Boost is to good for it's recharge/duration ratio.

Paragon Wiki has a detailed explanation for how defense set bonuses work with regard to the rule of fives on this page:
http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Invent...efense_Bonuses

I'm not sure I agree with that. You're assuming that the number of players who enjoy the current buffing outweighs the number who like support characters but can't stand the current buffing mechanics. Personally I play debuffers because I find the buffing mechanics in this game to be awful. If the buffing mechanics were more reasonable (to me) I'd probably have a 50/50 split between buffers and debuffers.

Just as a side point, you are neglecting the group of players who enjoy playing squishy support characters but do not want to play buff bots.

I love support characters (out of 10 characters half have buff/debuff sets, 2 defenders, a corruptor, a mastermind and a controller) but I cannot stand sets that require me to manually rebuff the entire team every 4 minutes. A move away from single target buffs would make it possible for me to the five buff/debuff sets I currently refuse to play (Thermal, Sonic, Cold, Force Field and Kinetics). I would love to have a Fire/Thermal Corruptor (or Defender if the devs ever get around to actually porting it) for concept reasons but I cannot stand the set.

Not everyone who plays support likes the same playstyle that you do.

Yes I have and even before I got my level shifts it wasn't that bad. Between careful inspiration usage and a lot of pet resummoning I was able to give what I consider a fair accounting of myself. I'm sorry that you found it rough going but please do not assume that everyone else had the same problem.

Me to. I think fixing the overpowered rain powers even at the cost of almost making interface no longer work with them needs to go live ASAP.

Me to, I have buyers remorse .

Ah ok, I was only aware of the "not working with pets" portion of the Beta.

Interface will not be as effective in some powers, specifically auras and pseudo-pet powers that work as auras. In regular click powers it will function exactly as it currently does on live. Eventually the devs will (hopefully) implement another patch to slightly improve how Interface works in pseudo-pet powers to make them function as intended (proc on all targets once every 10 seconds).

Actually the bug wasn't there in Beta. When the content originally went live Interface did not work in pet powers at all. They fixed that but unfortunately missed the bug that it wasn't obeying the 10 second rule in patches/auras. This patch fixes that bug but unfortunately introduces a new bug.

So to summarize:
Initial Release: Interface does not work with Pets at all
1st Patch: Interface works properly with regular pet attacks but is overpowered with Auras and aura-like pseudo-pets (no 10 second rule)
2nd patch (on test): Interface works properly with regular pet attacks and aura powers but is underpowered with aura-like pseudo-pets (only affects one target)

Hopefully in the future we will see a 3rd patch that fixes the 1 target problem with aura-like pseudo-pets.

Yes, it's not perfect. Ideally all three of these patches would have occurred before the trials went live however in the current situation I think the devs have done a reasonable job. Fixing Interface to work with Pets was clearly a high-priority requirement (since MMs got almost no benefit from it). Now ideally this second patch should change all powers to work as intended however given the choice between leaving them overpowered and over-nerfing them now with the intent to fix it later I agree with the devs that over-nerfing now is the better choice.

The current bug is a MAJOR power shift and the longer it's left in place the more it'll become accepted as WAI (we've already seen people respeccing or rerolling to take advantage of it). The over-nerf here is rather annoying but since it brings those powers closer to the desired power level than the current bug I think it's the best option.

Although I would like to see the fix to the fix to the fix implemented soon.

Yean, my Gun Drone likes to try and attack enemies by bouncing up and down on their head.

And yet MMOs keep making pet classes .

Well, that was an unfortunate typo *cough* I mean I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about .

The primary issue with this sort of thing is how to handle them in combat. There are two practical options (plus the impractical option of reanimating every power in the game). First is to do (as you suggested) the "emote" route and have them simply vanish in combat. The second would be to take the walk route and have most of your powers disabled when using it.

The problem with the AH as an Inf sink is that it's a scalable inf sink. It serves to place a finite cap on the value of Inf since a single "new" inf can only purchase 10 inf worth of goods before being sucked out of the system but it doesn't really serve to reign in player earnings.

We've seen a lot of variation in item pricing due to shifts in player activities (the AE farming craze being the best example) and the problem is that with the market fees being the only major inf sink market prices tend to be heavily linked to the earning rates of players. As people earn more prices go up. Having additional inf sinks acts as a dampener for that, earning rates go up but more people use the other sinks which helps keep market prices more stable.

I don't feel particularly strongly one way or the other about this specific inf sink (I don't use it but I don't object to it) but I think having a high-end inf sink is useful for the game.

What you really need here is Hasten. Taking that and AB and slotting them both for recharge will be almost enough on it's own to perma both powers and be able to constantly alternate auras. You need about 10% in other recharge bonuses to make it truly perma.

This was mentioned earlier in the thread, it is total income (which includes subscriptions).

It's no worse than running the Apex/Tin Mage TFs before T3 alphas were released. A good player can participate just fine in the trials with no Incarnate abilities at all. Sure, you're going to be less powerful than someone with a level shift but you are not useless. Also, from what I've heard the initial betas for these trials were done with no incarnate abilities at all so it's clearly doable.

The pet powers get no benefit form the Recharge portion of Spiritual. Pets themselves do not benefit from any recharge bonuses (for AI reasons) and since the pet powers cannot take generic recharge the Alpha does not benefit them either.

That doesn't make spiritual useless, most MMs have at least some long recharge powers in their secondary that will benefit from it.

Yes they do.

This is pretty much my advice as well. Start running the trials to build an uncommon (and get a head start on iXP for the other slots) then switch to running the WST and a few other TFs to get the Notice/Components/Shards needed for the rare and very rare.

If you're part of a really good speed running team you might find the TFs faster but if you're pugging the trials will almost certainly be faster for the uncommon. For the rare/very rare the guaranteed WST drop is probably better though (and for Villains don't forget the bonus one from the first time you do Mortimer Kal SF).

I would tend to agree with that. Personally I took a break when GR was released in part due to the pushback of the Incarnate System.

It varies a bit, all of the ones that match a pet from a player set (primarily Malta Gun Drones and Carny Phantasm and Dark Servant) are definitely 75% though.

I think we was actually suggesting doing that and using the combat log to check your to hit chance.