Jabbrwock

If said layman has been paying attention to game mechanics at all and has not gotten used to things that sound odd, he's either insane, stupid, or a genius. Regardless, the way PPM works is probably not going to sound odd to him. If he hasn't been paying attention to game mechanics in the past, he probably won't now, so again, it won't sound odd to him.

It's the people who aren't really laymen, and have gotten used to other game mechanics so they no longer sound odd any more, who will A) notice that a change has taken place, B) look up details on game mechanics, and C) decide that PPM, being relatively new, seems odd to them. They'll get used to it, just like they get used to 45% defense being the soft cap for normal content and then a higher number applying to incarnate content, or resistance resisting resistance debuffs, or a bunch of "attacks" actually being pseudo-pet summons, or any of the other wackiness that shows up when you really look at CoH mechanics.

TL;DR - it's not the first odd sounding thing in CoH mechanics, and it won't be the last.

I don't think it is true, actually.

With 0 defense and 90% resistance, given that resistance includes resistance debuff resistance, the debuff is effectively a 2% resistance debuff. That makes your effective resistance 88%. At 0 defense and 88% resistance, you are hit 50% of the time for 12% of the damage, which works out to 6% of the damage.

With 45% defense and 0 resistance, you are hit 5% of the time for 120% of the damage, which is also 6% of the damage.

My math could easily be screwed up, though. Or my understanding of how the game works. But that's what my napkin math showed me.

But an obviously bugged (and so extremely bugged) behavior of Scrapper crits is a sign of Scrappers not working either as intended or as designed, and would thus be on the short list for most urgent fixes. As such, comparison between Scrapper and Brute performance while such a bug is in force is invalid in even the medium term.

Ice Blast is a Blaster primary. It's not even widely regarded as the best Blaster primary - that goes to Fire Blast in most discussions I've seen.

I think i24 has established that "not even the best Blaster primary" is by definition an underperformer. We'll have to wait and see how big a difference snipes and long range t3 blasts make on other sets to see whether getting sustain in its secondary is enough to make Ice Blast perform on par with the new performance expected of a Blaster Primary.

I will be extremely sad of the devs see Ice Blast performing badly, decide "Oh well, it has lots of mitigation and doesn't need to perform well," and leave it be. That said, I don't expect it to happen. There are lots of people who chose the set more for good single target damage and low-ish but not terrible AoE damage who don't deserve to have their choices invalidated because every other choice got buffed past it.

Ice is rather significantly failing to be improved in any way except the nuke change - which is not negligible. Ice for Corruptors and Defenders is at least arguably being nerfed, since IIRC they were using the Blaster versions of Ice Storm and Blizzard. As far as other changes go, though, Ice has neither a snipe nor a short ranged tier 3 attack to be buffed in i24, and I expect it to be a rather poor performer until the devs start evaluating sets that were not adjusted or were not adequately adjusted (Elec Blast says "Hi!") in the first round of Blaster buffs.

Agreed. The problem with Kinetics/Fire Defenders compared to Fire/Kinetics Corruptors has nothing to do with the strength of Kinetics scaling between AT's. It's almost entirely the product of both sets being almost tailor made to cater to the specific advantages of the Corruptor AT, except where those sets are almost tailor made to take advantage of the disadvantages of the Defender AT.

Huge damage buff to approach or hit your damage cap? Check. DoT powers to Scourge most efficiently? Check. Lack of any *ACTUAL* secondary effect of the blasts for Defender AT mods to boost? Check.

I won't say there are no issues with AT balance between Corruptors and Defenders, because I haven't closely examined the issue. Using Fire Blast and Kinetics as the two sets to use as a baseline to argue that there is, however, is a terrible idea. Some sets are better on one AT even though they are available on several. This combo just happens to use two of them that both favor Corruptors.

I'm not that charitable, so I tend to believe that the people who just want to annoy other people are mostly operating in other games where they will find more people to annoy. There are benefits to being a niche gaming community.

Have you taken the i24 resistance set bonuses, both the added ones and the improved ones, into account? Even if you don't think you'll be pushing 75% resistance with Dark Armor now, you're far more likely to see it happening in i24.

Thus, I would recommend a Brute, as I would with essentially any set with substantial resistances to build from.

Do we know if the summer blockbuster is going to be a regular occurrence and come back next summer? Or are we looking at something where the current supply of Overwhelming Force enhancements is all there will ever be, ever? The latter seems unlikely, given the history of other seasonal events, but I'm always kind of paranoid about that sort of thing.

On the subject of chainsaws, I still want a Rocket Propelled Chainsaw as an option in at least one blast set or ancillary pool.

Isn't that sword-chucks?

In that 4% when both fire, would they add up to enough to cause a knockback effect, and if they did, what direction would it knock the foes?

That's pretty much a straw man. The real problem is that content where a Tanker's advantage in tanking actually results in better performance for the team is vanishingly rare, while content where a Brute's advantage in dealing damage while tanking matters, albeit in many teams not very much, almost all the time.

Thank you for going away.

If it does excellent damage for its animation time, and recharges quickly enough that you can drop a less time-efficient attack for it, it can make a substantial difference. Granted, it's only for single target damage, but both Brutes and Tankers are hard targets - the minion rabble will be quickly thinned out by AoE from both AT's, which leaves killing the bosses or at least lieutenants as the real limitation.

The range is a meaningless benefit most of the time, and the DOT nature is generally a meaningless disadvantage. The big thing is that it animate quickly and to good total damage for its animation time.

Costume narcissism may be the key selling feature of CoH. I've played lots of other games since I first tried CoH in beta, and I keep coming back to CoH because, well, I like the costume creation. I leave for long periods because I get tired of the gameplay, but I come back for the costumes, and because when I'm not tired of the gameplay, I enjoy it.

I would have left the game forever after the global defense nerf (which in retrospect I agree was needed, but it annoyed me at the time and drove most of my real life friends who played away) if the costume creator weren't so amazing.

In other words, I would wholly support a "no fade" power option on Cloaking Device. Also, I can see it being hugely obnoxious in escort missions, since you need sustain to survive, and you need to not be stealthed to do the escort.

Difficult but functional would be to up the aggro cap for Tankers and up the target cap for Tanker AoE attacks. The Tanker would do less damage, but could leverage his survivability by fighting larger groups of enemies at a time, and killing them slowly in large numbers instead of more quickly but in smaller numbers.

Pretty sure this won't fly both because the aggro cap is likely very difficult to change on a per character basis, and because the devs wouldn't want to make the game even more AoE focused.

Sometimes you *ARE* in the middle of a mob. Having sustain in a power that you really shouldn't be using in that situation is not the greatest idea, IMHO.

That one's always irritated me too - most of the others I never actually noticed. But it always seemed odd that Blasters had their ability to apply one of the self buffs most critical to dealing damage crippled out of fear that they might use Tactics effectively. Or am I missing something and Tactics is not actually the only to-hit buff Blasters can use that is not self-only?

That explains why your numbers require higher Fury to match a Scrapper than mine did. What kind of foes to mids assume for criticals, or did Scrapper criticals get normalized across enemy ranks while I was away?

Interesting. Just going off of their respective damage scales of 0.75 for Brutes and 1.125 for Scrappers, my calculations suggested that it would take about 49% Fury for a Brute to catch up and do as much damage as a Scrapper. Not being a math whiz, and coming from a long break from the game, I decided not to post it, trusting that somebody else would catch him if he was wrong.

Is your data purely tested, or was it a calculation from numbers on the web?

Fury is the dominant mechanic of Brute play. It drives the build decisions and play style right up until high levels and IO's and, potentially, external buffs allow Brutes to get by without paying it quite so much heed. Fury is what makes a character with Scrapper level damage and, barring external buffs, Scrapper level defensive numbers feel dramatically different from Scrappers.

This thread is about vampires, not Twilight characters.