Arbiter Hawk

All powers are retaining their old functionality - they are only gaining new functions on top of what they had before. Field Operative will still provide just as much stealth and Defense as Cloaking Device did before it.

1.) Very

2.) Nope!

Good question! I shall reply with a paraphrased meme, in honor of the upcoming costume contest: "If you take damage and you don't get any health back, you're gonna have a bad time."

Sustain is basically the idea of moderate but reliable amounts of healing over time, usually used in the game industry in the context of damage dealing/non-tanky characters still being able to keep themselves alive while solo. There are only two ATs with no Sustain functionality in their powersets right now - Dominators and Blasters. However, Dominators mitigate much more damage than Blasters due to their control, allowing their baseline Sustain from health to cover the amount of damage they take each spawn.

Hah, you caught me... but it doesn't have a t3 blast to benefit from that range buff, and has been bandied about as an underperforming blast set due to said lack of t3 blast, which is why I brought it up.

Tier 4, 5, and 6 are the eligible tiers for a sustain power - players need that power before level 20, and getting it before 10 would potentially rob people of an early attack chain in favor of being defensive, which isn't really representative of how the AT plays.

For Electric Manipulation, that means the eligible powers were Havoc Punch, Build Up, and Lightning Clap. Of the three, I thought Lightning Clap made the most sense - you could use it outside of combat to get its benefit, its recharge was low enough, and there was very little reason to take it in most non-concept builds as-is.

Yes, I'm on a mission to slowly clean up player pet AI, but it's a slow and laborious process. Whenever I look at a pet, though, that is one of the things I try to fix with it (though it's not always possible).

It's certainly worth considering! I'd only seen it brought up once before, but we'll look at it. Mental Manipulation has kind of operated in its own paradigm independent of other Blaster Support sets for years, but a lot of that paradigm contributed to making that secondary both powerful and fun to play.

They probably won't all be normalized, but AR, Archery, and Beam Rifle may change since right now they look kinda funky if you have to draw the weapon.

These may see changes. They should be high damage and good power picks but they are also ranged attacks in PPPs on Melee ATs. They should not be as awesome as the Ranged Blast snipes.

Interestingly, due to Blaze's insanely fast activation time, Fire Blast doesn't gain that much relative to other powersets if both Blaze and Blazing Bolt are off cooldown and the 22% To Hit threshold has been reached. Fire Blast was designed with the notion of its secondary effect being "Moar Damage". Is that fair? It does give up some utility for damage, and the amount of "Moar Damage" is not huge due to how DoTs work in our game, but on top of having extra damage, it also has some of the highest DPA of any ranged set, which is not a controlled balancing factor in our powers system (though Synapse and I both take DPA into account when making changes these days, it is not expressly limited by our damage formula)

This is not something we're looking at doing at this time.

Changing Drain Psyche at all would necessitate drastically reducing the amount of Recovery it grants, flagging the Regeneration debuff to ignore enhancements and outside buffs, and dropping the Regen buff per target but frontloading a more significant amount of its overall Regen buff. Would this be a worthwhile trade for greater ease of use and higher accessability for lower-end and non-IO builds?

My pleasure. I love this community, and talking about powers is probably my favorite thing ever. XD

We've considered it, but we would prefer to fix layered and repeated crowd control problems from the NPC side rather than from the player side. I want to add CC suppression to NPC CC powers at some point in the future - maybe i24, more likely i25 or later. This would dramatically lower the performance delta between characters with access to status protection and those without. But it's a massive amount of data to parse and then change, so it's a timely and costly endeavour.

Water Blast is on Beta now! Go check it out, it's a really fun set!

This may be a common misconception. The two effects are functionally identical in most significant ways, so making them perform identically is just a question of doing the math on the scales of the effects. There is no difference between Regenerating 1% of your health per second and Healing 1% of your health per second.

Warning: Game Design terms follow. Beware the buzzwords!

There are two important ideas to consider when looking at character durability - Mitigation and Avoidance. In City of Heroes, Defense is our Avoidance stat - high defense sets such as Super Reflexes have high Avoidance but low Mitigation. Resistance, Regeneration, Absorb, and Healing are all Mitigation stats - they take damage that you've taken and make it matter less.

How durable any given character can be is often called Effective Health. This is a combination of that character's Avoidance and Mitigation. What you are describing above is not an inherent attribute of Mitigation, but rather a scenario in which one the defense-based character's Effective Health is much higher than the Regen based character's.

Some Blaster mods do feel a bit low. Whether or not we will change them at this point, I'm not sure - it's a very risky change, because changing class mods changes how every single one of their powers works. If Blaster Effective Health is still found to be wanting after these changes, however, the buffs will continue until performance improves.

We know nukes are a problem. We know some nukes are more fun than others. If and when we tackle the problem of nukes, we will likely look at what is already fun about some nukes, and try to channel that to make the other nukes more fun.

We'll probably do something that makes Build Up better in the Snipe combination.

It's on our list of powersets to look at. That list is pretty long, though. But yes, we have a plan for something cool to do with Time Bomb to make it more useful in the future. No timeframe given for this, though!

If it's a toggle power or a PBAoE power, it doesn't need to hit an enemy at all. If it's enemy-targeted single target, it still needs to hit an enemy, but its accuracy will be highly boosted.

I would consider making snipes also instant while under the effects of Domination, but if I did so I would also lower the scale of all of the Dominator snipes back to the 2.76 standard.

If it's not already flagged as Cancelable, I will flag it as such. For those of you who may not know this, i20 or i21 introduced the ability to cancel many buffs in game by right-clicking their icon and selecting "Cancel" from the drop-down menu.

Right now, I think it's ok as-is, but beta testing and feedback may prove me wrong. Given its recharge time is fairly low and the duration of the buff it provides is 60 seconds, I think you'll usually be able to use it before getting near a spawn if you don't want the knockback aspect of the power.

It's true that To-Hit is somewhat arcane, but this mechanic actually boils down pretty simply:

-"Hit Aim, Snipe becomes instant."
-"Pop 3 small yellows, Snipe becomes instant."
-"Get a big team with people running leadership, Snipe becomes instant."

Or, most simply, "If you get a yellow ring around your Snipe attack, you can click it and use it in combat." I've spent at least 30 hours testing all of these mechanics on Blasters internally, and our QA team has been sending me messages like "When will this go live? I want my live blaster to be this fun!"

We kicked around a number of possible activation conditions before settling on To-Hit - High health enemies, low health enemies, enemies at long range, enemies at short range, Just used Aim, Just used Build-Up, Your last snipe was interruptible, etc. - but ultimately I do actually think To-Hit accomplishes our goal in a number of ways. This redirect condition is simple enough that all ATs can use it equally, and easy enough to understand that players shouldn't have a problem getting used to it. It also is increasingly more probable of being met as team size increases, which helps counteract the perception that snipes are less and less worth using as team size increases.

We will probably measure and adjust Voltaic Sentinel's uptime and DPS to make it functionally equivalent to having a tier 3 blast.

If you take neither a tier 3 blast, nor a snipe, nor the sustain power in your secondary, you will not currently feel any changes. Personally, I would highly encourage taking the sustain power in your secondary come i24 - they are all fairly easy to use effectively and will drastically increase your survivability. But if you choose not to, your Blaster will still be just as functional as it is today.

Putting all of the bonus in one power has the downside of causing a lot of people to try to take that power, but has the notable upside of only requiring you to fit one different power into your build if you didn't take it already. Ultimately I felt that tweaking one power in each secondary was less disruptive to the build metagame than it would be if I had changed, say, three powers in each secondary and given them each a third of the total sustain power.

Whenever we're making a change to something that's already live, we recognize that it has the risk of being controversial or making people feel that it's unnecessary. In this case, changing the name of the changed abilities in each Blaster secondary powerset was done to indicate that the ability's function had substantially changed, and that players who were used to Cloaking Device's function and deciding whether or not to take it should now re-read it and make their build decisions accordingly.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the name Cloaking Device, but naming it something new is more likely to get the percentage of players who don't read patch notes to readjust their opinion of that power.

Regeneration attributes will be 50% enhanceable - this means those powers will accept both standard Heal enhancements as well as Heal IO sets. Healing and Absorbption attributes will be 100% enhanceable so that you don't see two separate numbers tick over your head every time you use them, but their base value of hitpoints per second will start slightly lower so that the average enhanced performance of all Sustain abilities is within the same ballpark across all Blaster secondaries.

Dual Pistols' animation times are being shortened to raise the set's DPA across the board. Ice Blast, Sonic Attack, and Electric Blast are on Synapse's and my radar to make sure they perform up to par with the new blast set paradigm, and will likely see additional changes to ensure that they are not "left behind" on account of not having a snipe.

That's exactly what it is. Pendragon gets the honor of "First absorb power used in game". If you look at his health bar in the Target window when he uses his Fae Shield, you should see part of that bar colored in as white, representing the amount of absorb he has left. I also put it in the trial's UI, since absorb is new, but in the future that's one thing to keep your eye on, especially once players start getting absorb in their own hands...

If you defeat the guards before they reach him, or if you keep them out of the range of his Power of Tartarus (60' Sphere centered on him), he will not receive the buff from sacrificing the guards.

An interesting note about the buff from this power is that it stacks in a new way - every time he receives a stack of the buff, it refreshes the duration of all other stacks. The buff duration is 60 seconds, so that means that in order to keep him from building up his ToHit and damage bonus, you need to keep the Olympian Guards more than 60 feet away from him for one minute.

Additionally, he runs out of Olympian Guards when his health hits 40%, which means that a minute after he dips below 40%, his buffs from Power of Tartarus will expire.

It's not intended to be particularly secret - there's a red text floater when each is defeated that briefly describes what mechanic is added to the fight. The inspiration for these mechanics was to turn the Battle Royale into a montage of many of the mechanics you've overcome on your Incarnate journey.

Banish is a variation on Sequestration Field. Chimera's minefield is a souped-up version of Director 11's Minelayer. Pendragon's Excalibur attacks are a dark version of Battle-Maiden's Halberd strikes. Our intent here was that this gauntlet reminded you of everything you've already overcome and at the same time made the trial more approachable, since you already know how to beat all of these things. The only trick then comes from determining what order and combination of mechanics your league can confront, which you then create based on what order you defeat the trio of enemies.

Shadowhunter uses a power called Grasp of the Beyond. This power kicks in when his health is lower than half. This is its descriptive text:

• "Shadowhunter seeks to drag those near him into the Shadow Realm as he feels his own death draw imminent. The closer he is to death, the harder it is for nearby players to heal."

Each time this power ticks, it places resistance to Heal on every nearby character proportional to the amount of health he has left. So if you bring Shadowhunter down to 50% (or he heals himself back to 50% with twilight grasp), you can definitely have some windows where healing doesn't do nearly as much as you're used to. Of course, you can solve this problem by defeating him or by leaving his health above 50%.

Black Swan's Throw Quills power will disable all of your epic powers, including your incarnate powers but also APP/PPP powers. Her Quills of Jocas will only deal you one negative level shift for each shift you have on the character (Ultimate inspirations excepted)

I'll look at these reports of erroneous reward tables right away. Nobody actually playing the event all the way through should be getting this table - in fact, they should be getting a reward table with the same odds of Rare/Very Rare as Minds of Mayhem, TPN Campus, and Dilemma Diabolique.

Thanks! It was a lot of fun designing and implementing this trial, as a longtime CoH player whose mind was blown when I first encountered Praetorians back in issue 1. I'm very glad to hear of people enjoying the thing I spent months of my life putting together.

Yes, pets are intended to receive the shifts as well. The power was originally structured as a 5000 foot sphere that ignored line of sight - but spheres have a default target cap of 16. I've restructured it as a map-wide power with a target cap of 255, so it should be easily able to buff a full mastermind league and all of their pets after the coming update.