Hopeling

If you are ever doing anything in an MMO, whether it involves spending money or not, specifically for the quantity of its performance, it is subject to change.

Period.

Titan Weapons could get nerfed. Nobody will be justified in asking for their 800 points back. Dual Pistols could get buffed. Nobody will be justified in being mad that they missed its sale back at the Gunslinger set's release.

Yes, Performance Shifter getting 1.5 PPM makes it abnormal compared to other procs that are also 20% as IOs. However, Performance Shifter is also abnormal in it uses compared to those procs. 20% -> 3 PPM is a rule of thumb, at best, and it should not be a surprise to anyone that a rule of thumb is not very good in edge cases.

It got 3 PPM because most 20% procs get that, without considering if that was appropriate for how it was actually used, and then was rushed through beta at a time when very few players were aware of PPM at all, much less understood how it worked. The lead powers guy was literally unaware of its effectiveness. That is not a mark of something done intentionally. If the functionality is both unintended and undesirable to the devs, that's... uh, pretty much the definition of a bug.

I'm a t9 VIP. I've had Celestial since the day it came out, and bought a lot of points immediately to get there. And like I said, I think your suggestion sounds like the worst of both worlds: most of the exclusivity is lost, AND the players who didn't have it are still unhappy. So yes, I think it would make more players happy to not sell it at all than to sell it and leave out the best parts.

And no, if the whole set went on the market, I don't think that would cheapen the concept. There will be two other VIP t9 sets I can wear for exclusivity by then.

The whole thing is clearly a matter of opinion, so I don't particularly expect to convince you here, but that goes both ways. Despite my having spent $150 extra for Celestial, I still don't agree that any part of it needs to stay exclusive forever. We don't yet know what the alternate method will be, anyway.

Yeah, I hope a floor or something is implemented. It's one thing for slower powers to now be a relatively better place to put the proc, but it's another matter to trash the existing uses and make them worse than they currently are.

Well for one thing, (6.5+2.23)*4.5/60 = .65 = 65%, which is still substantially greater than 33%. But also, which means you'll actually get a higher chance than that, probably much higher, depending on how much PPMs are increased by.

Per Arcanaville a while ago, the proc rate is adjusted by the power's aoemod (used to calculate how much less damage it does than an equivalent ST attack), which is based on arc and radius. Target cap actually is not even a factor. And cones were wonky somehow, I'm not sure if that's been fixed yet.

Give me a couple minutes to dig up the post and the formula.

Edit: OK, here's one of the relevant posts, which also contains the formula: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...&postcount=164
That formula can be simplified to:
AoEMod = 1 + radius * (11 * arc + 540) / 30000
which is equivalent, but much nicer to look at.

Then don't wait. Just use CS right after AS, just as you do now, and if it procced, great.

Losing the reliability definitely makes it worse, but it doesn't make it totally useless.

Past the early levels, the vast majority of builds have gapless or nearly-gapless attack chains. At that point, more recharge doesn't mean using proportionally more attacks, it just means that your best attacks are a larger fraction of the attacks that you do make. So, roughly the same number of power activations, but lower proc chance = less procs. This is most extremely clear when you consider someone using a specific pre-calculated attack chain - say, Incinerate-Scorch-Cremate-Scorch in Fiery Melee - hitting them with Speed Boost will not change which nor how many attacks they use at all, but their procs will be less likely to go off.

That sounds like the worst of both worlds: people who aren't t9 VIP in the appropriate timeframe still can't get pieces they want, and people who value the exclusivity still lose most of it.

Since they fixed it to still be more powerful than the dropped versions (but only slightly more powerful instead of hugely), I'm not convinced you're right. Or maybe they fixed it that way to try to placate the people who had bought it just for its overperformance, or because 1.2 PPM would be a weird number.

Since Shield has no heal in the set, many (most?) Shield builds use Rebirth. Trading that for Barrier, even if it gets you to the cap for 30 seconds every 120, is probably a net loss in survivability.

Since you can slot the SBE proc, and the rest of the set crafted and +5'ed, and still get the set bonuses, there's not even a tradeoff, other than points vs Inf. Also, I don't find it particularly useful to +5 a whole purple set, only one or two pieces at most, due to ED.

Personally, now that they've actually communicated their decision on the matter (make all the procs the same, although not until i24), I'm pretty much satisfied on this topic.

Yes, just Hecatomb. It's a test case for SBE purples in general. The other purple sets are already on beta, so assuming this goes over well, they'll probably arrive soon too.

True in the general case, but OneFrigidWitch's gold name says that's not an option for him/her. Of course, the gold name also means "assuming you have zero points to start" is not necessarily a good assumption, but hopefully it illustrates how things work.

You're not locked into Darkest Night. 45% defense plus occasional insp use is perfectly fine even without DN.