Diellan_

Too bad. 1.195 is an acceptable AoE mod for Piercing Rounds.

Yeah, I do have a lot of issues with cones, and Piercing Rounds is even more bizarre than normal. It has a range of 80 feet and an arc of 4 degrees, which means that the formula would dictate an AoE mod of 2.56 (for those playing at home, the AoE mod is what the damage is divided by, so that is the number of targets required to break even). Meanwhile, Energy Torrent, a 40 foot cone with an arc of 45 degrees, has an AoE mod of 2.38, a smaller number. Which one of these is easier to target multiple enemies is rather obvious. It's an outlier case, but the same thing happens with Night Fall, 60 feet and 19 degrees, which has an AoE mod of 2.498 (also bigger than Energy Torrent's).

Thankfully, the Devs tweaked the formula for Piercing Rounds in specific, and treat it as if it has an AoE mod of 1.74, which is still way too high. Not only is it generally difficult for this power to hit more than one target, it has a target cap of only 3 enemies, so even the best player is only going to see a limited benefit of this power, when compared to other cones.

The formula is just plain bizarre. Buckshot and Flamethrower have the same range of 40 feet, while the first has a 30 degree arc and the second a 45 degree arc; their AoE mods are 2.16 and 2.38 respectively. One of those powers is much more likely to get more foes than the other. From what I see playing with the radius and arc, it has a valley shape to it, where any extreme values throw it off entirely (e.g. doubling the arc versus multiplying the radius by sqrt(2) only give equivalent modifiers for specific values - outside of that, one will win over the other).

I think Starsman had put together a more reasonable estimate for useability of aoe powers way back when he was trying to analyze aoe performance of dominators, that takes into account spawn dispersion and enemy size.

P.S. Yeah, the degenerate case bothers me. Only an attack of radius 0 will have an AoE mod of 1. Melee attacks have a range of 7, which would be a mod of 1.126 if you had an arc of 0. Pendulum, with an arc of 180, should have an AoE mod of 1.588, but it does slightly more than that.

P.P.S. Where does an AoE factor of 1.195 come from? At the 80 feet of Power Bolt, even an attack of 1 degree has an AoE mod of 2.4693.

The duration change is a QoL feature more than anything else. Having to constantly recast this power is, frankly, annoying. Perma pets generally last for 1000 seconds, though they can be killed. If they can make it work with their new weird tech, I'd say it should be a toggle (that does not suppress when mezzed) like Dimension Shift and Lifegiving Spores in Nature Affinity, that way people wouldn't have to resummon it all the time, have the ability to dismiss it and resummon it at will, and still get the ability to have it zap things while you are mezzed.

If you read any of my other recent posts in this thread, you'll see that I have been coming up with alternate chains and including recharge slotting.

Yes, I remember the last massive Electric Blast discussion, and my position hasn't changed from what it was before: Short Circuit's long recharge and animation time means that no, Electric does not have better raw actual damage than Energy Blast, because Energy Blast can cycle Energy Torrent in almost half the time of Short Circuit. Energy Torrent has a problem with keeping enemies clumped together, yes. The other issue is that since Electric Blast's AoE damage is focused on long DoTs, it winds up being terrible for mitigating alpha strikes, a primary function of AoE attacks on Blasters. My suggestions back then were:

1) Change Short Circuit's damage to be up front.
2) Give Tesla Cage damage equal to a 10 second recharging attack.
3) Increase Voltaic Sentinel's duration.
4) Front load more of Ball Lightning's damage.

Very small, minor changes, that will result in providing the set with a significant ease-of-play boost.

Edana was using CB's chain.

My desire to nerf DP is because the power is so crazy that it makes it difficult to look at other things. It's like how the Devs aren't able to make tweaks to Stone Armor or Super Strength or Kinetics because there is no way that they can buff the underperforming powers in those sets without nerfing the overperforming ones. Also, most of these problems were inherited from other Devs who aren't the current Devs.

Hence why I specifically said that it should be a situational power. Stacking holds on a boss is one such situation. There's a difference between "attack chain you use when beating down an AV while buffed to the gills on a team of multiple controllers who surely have it handled" and "soloing a Rikti Mesmerist". But when people ask us about damage, then we're going to talk about damage. I listed the caveats, please do not ignore them.

Thank you for making my point for me, which is that the fact that two AoE powers you have access to are better than this ST power when it comes to making a damage oriented attack chain, meaning that not only are you choosing to do less damage against a single target, but you're missing out on the ability to do much much more damage by hitting extra targets.

I have no problems calculating AoE powers, which is why I always suggest them to people, even the long recharging ones like the cone breath powers.

Well, if you're going to resort to Ad Hominems, be my guest. If it makes you sleep better at night to think that people who can do math don't play this game, don't let me stop you. I just ask that you keep your wounded feelings and holier-than-thou attitude away from reasonable discussion. It's very easy to just put everybody that you disagree with into a box, give it a label, then stereotype them away. Yes, I like math. Yes, I care about game balance. Yes, I am a programmer and I work on Mids. I'm also a heavy RPer and writer, and spend more time doing that than crunching numbers.

Actually, VS is really easy to account for. The little guy deals 44.49 damage every 3.82 seconds (given ArcanaTime), giving it a total contribution of 11.65 dps that is unaffected by recharge or damage buffs (outside enhancements) including Defiance. So you just add that to whatever your chain is, and you're done.

A build operating at +140% recharge can do LB > CB > BL > CB > LB > CB > Zapp for 629.36 damage over 13.068 seconds, which is 48.16 dps. VS bumps that up to 59.81 dps. This is without factoring enhancements, which would bump that up to almost double. The theoretical best chain for LB is CB > LB > CB > BL, which takes a ridiculous amount of recharge to pull off (+278%), and deals 291.53 damage over 5.544 seconds, for 52.58 dps - 64.23 dps with VS.

Yeah, wow, that's terrible. Shocking Bolt has ridiculously bad DPA, even worse than Static Discharge, a long animating cone. Short Circuit is better than Shocking Bolt for damage. In fact, Brawl has better DPA. I cannot in good faith suggest to anybody to make Shocking Bolt a regular part of their attack chain, rather than a situational power used for holding annoying targets. Unless you play Devices, you certainly have a single target power in your secondary that is better than that.

Zapp, on the other hand, is not nearly as abysmal. It's still very poor, but it's got twice the DPA of Shocking Bolt.

Because the Dominator version came first and because it was in a set with the original overpowered Psychic Shockwave, when Psi Assault was revamped, it didn't get touched (yeah, PS was so good, it eclipsed DP).

Then when the Blaster version was added, they reduced the value because the existing one was too powerful. They didn't know how much to reduce it, because, well, the Devs aren't very good at measuring out +Regen and -Regen. They're learning, but still.

I do. It starts with removing the ability to enhance the -Regen. It is the only regen debuff (that I know of offhand) that can do this.

That's less simple in that it requires them to decide how much of the DoT is normal and how much is bonus, which isn't something that's ever been standardized. Changing it to frontloaded damage also helps with the big problem the set has on blasters, which is that the aoe damage is sustained damage, not burst damage. Currently, from the time you hit the button until the time the last tick of damage is dealt, seven seconds have passed. That's an eternity when alpha strikes are considered.

Ball Lightning, for example, does scale 1.02 damage, whereas it should be 0.9, so it gets a bonus of 0.12 damage. It deals only scale 0.3 damage immediately, and the rest over a whopping 3.1 seconds. Short Circuit deals 0.9 damage, whereas it should be 0.89, so it gets a bonus of 0.01 damage. It deals all 0.9 damage over 4.1 seconds.

For comparison, Irradiate has the same 20 second recharge and 20 foot radius, has an animation time of 1.07 seconds, and deals scale 1 damage over 4.6 seconds (a bonus of 0.11).

Right now, Short Circuit does the right amount of damage for its radius and recharge, but it does it as a long 4.1 second DoT, and usually DoT damage comes for "free" to one extant or another. I think the simple solution to the power is to change it from DoT to straight damage. It also needs to have the animation time reduced, but that's a bit harder to get from the Devs.

I'm guessing he's talking about (a) the fact that Ball Lightning is an AoE, so the AoE modifier lowers its proc rate and double hit damage; and (b) Support won't buff VS.

Well, Voltaic Sentinel is basically 11 DPS for "free" on top of your chain, which is supposed to allow for the overall lack of good DPA attacks. The problem is that the set is short one ST attack power from having a full chain at all (even the top chain with Ball Lightning assumes that you spend some time doing nothing and waiting for recharge).

Mids is accurate in most cases. The issue with Blazing Aura is that it deals its damage once every 2 seconds, while the Interface will proc only once every 10 seconds.

Yeah. Which is really funny, because the melee AT players consider Ball Lightning to be one of the better epic powers. The issue, though, is that it has a 16 second recharge, making it really difficult to use in a regular chain before high recharge.

That's exactly what it is. Ball Lightning has a really fast animation time, and on an "IO" build (which I'm guessing means perma-Hasten), it recharges fast enough that you can make a chain that includes it. Only in that case do you wind up significantly better than Energy Blast, and that's only because Energy Blast sees almost zero improvement from recharge, because its single target blasts all have very similar DPA.

Synapse already said yes on the beta forums.

http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/power...argeting_Drone

http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/power...e.Sniper_Rifle

Yes.

Well, either they're going to give the "right" amount of sustain, which means that Blasters will still be below par, or they'll give them too much sustain, which means that Blasters will be "good enough" and then they can't balance the sets without nerfing those powers. I fear they're going to put themselves in between a rock and a hard place when I24 beta comes around, in that if they choose the first option, there'll be too much complaining about the powers not being strong enough, driving them closer to the second option.

The survivability levels are completely reasonable, but putting everything into one power is going to make things worse in the long run: as we can see from Stone Armor and Kinetics, powersets that have one extremely amazing power become impossible for the Devs to tweak in the future, as there is no way to buff the crap powers without nerfing the uber power. What I don't want is for these powers to be so strong that they won't ever be able to tweak Blaster secondaries again.

DPS of Electric's ST attack chain, including Voltaic Sentinel, is almost exactly tied with Energy Blast (Electric Blast is something like 4% better).

So does that mean we can finally implement my idea of Defiance 3.0: replacing the damage buffs with a meter, and then give all Blaster powers a Double Hit mechanic that is based upon this meter. That is, all Blasters powers would have an extra damage effect whose magnitude is a function of their normal damage and the percent of the meter.

Then we can just make it so that BU and Aim would fill the meter by x amount, and make the Improved Snipe work based upon this meter (of course, that wouldn't work for other ATs).