Obitus

Yeah, I remember a lot of talk early on about Defenders having their ratio adjusted to match Blasters'. Some took it a step further and demanded absolutely uniform DPE for all Archetypes, which at the time didn't make much sense to me, but I don't see any reason that DPE should be tied uniformly to the AT damage scalar either.

You make a lot of good points about toggle powers. And Starsman is obviously correct about "SPE." I wouldn't oppose a boost to Tanker DPE; hell, my INV/SS would be freaking ecstatic -- but I don't think it's quite fair to say that Tankers' DPE disadvantage (as compared to Brutes) is entirely unwarranted either.

Hypothetically, if (defensive) toggle powers were changed to have no endurance cost, then how much do you think the devs would have to tweak attack costs to compensate? Hm, you're probably right; maybe that is too expansive a question for this thread. Interesting thought though, for sure.

In this case, the reverse would true.

Again, our differences are irreconcilable, so I'm not going point-for-point with you anymore, but the above quote is a mischaracterization (or perhaps a misunderstanding) of the previous discussion about Freezing Rain.

The point wasn't that Freezing Rain is OMGuberpowerful and therefore Corrupters don't deserve any buffs. The point is that support ATs do have access to powerful damage buffs that are arguably as good or better than Build Up. The point was made in response to an assertion that the snipe change is designed around the availability of Build Up.

To sum up that little thread of the discussion:

Person A -- "The developers designed the snipe change to give extra benefit to ATs that don't have Build Up. They get more consistent access to fast Snipes to offset their lack of Build Up's damage bonus."

Person B -- "Many of the relevant builds that lack Build Up also get massive damage-boosting powers. Like Freezing Rain, etc."

You -- <comment about how Corrupters aren't overpowered because they have Freezing Rain.>

To be clear, I'm not accusing you of anything here. I honestly believe at this point that the acrimony between us (to the extent that there is any) is largely a result of the inevitable misunderstandings that crop up over a thread as long as this one.

Yeah, that's true, if the target is hit with both the first and the last tick of the rain (and the bug doesn't rear it's ugly head).

I guess the duration of the debuff is most accurately represented as a continuum between 30-45 seconds. Good point

We've exhausted the rest of the argument, but I do feel the need to respond to this one quote, because it bespeaks a fundamental misunderstanding: I used two quotes from you, one in which you accuse me of having a "corrupted" viewpoint because I want the snipe changes to take overall AT balance into account, and then a second quote in which you accused me of looking at the snipe change in a vacuum.

Feel free to go back and look at the relevant quotes. Yeah, it's irrelevant gotcha-game nonsense, but I wasn't using other people's quotes against you.

Edit - Also:

I never said anything of the kind.

I'm not going to respond to the generalized ad hominem, except to say that although I'm not secretly campaigning for perma-fast snipes to be added to my pet AT, I also don't think such a change would be unwarranted for Blasters. (Personally, I have more invested in my Dominator than I do in my Blaster, and as far as I'm concerned Dominators don't need any buff, via snipes or otherwise, so take that for what you will.)

More to the point in the above-quoted post, Oathbound may have misused the word, "substantially," to describe the advantage perma-fast Snipe will give to Defenders, relative to a generic Blaster's snipes. There isn't a huge quantitative difference between perma-fast snipe and, say, fast snipe with 70 or 80% uptime. From that standpoint, you're right.

However, I believe the problem isn't that the disparity in the snipe buff is "substantial;" my problem is that the Snipe buff (as we understand it right now) represents a "substantial" theoretical boost to single-target damage. And if the snipe buff is irregularly applied, it could therefore stand in the way of more generalized (less conditional) single-target buffs to sets or ATs or builds for which the fast snipe isn't even all that much help, practically.

That's why I can't entirely divorce the snipe buff from the Blaster balance pass. Yes, blast sets generally need help. Many of us have written pages and pages on that subject. Yes, snipes could use a boost to make them more attractive. But no boost occurs in a vacuum; it seems needless to add a convoluted context-dependent single-target-damage buff to blast sets in the midst of the long-awaited Blaster balance pass.

The fact that a different AT benefits more from the change is illustrative of the snipe change's unnecessary balance complexity, but it's not in itself objectionable. This isn't a matter of Defenders or Corruptors versus Blasters; it's a matter of blast sets' receiving an obscure and balance-complicating quirk when what they could really use is an across-the-board, brute-force improvement.

Let's normalize tier 3 blasts, for instance; make Shout and Power Burst and Cosmic Burst activate as fast as Blaze. Too much? Melee sets beg to differ.

The TL;DR of this rambling exposition is that it concerns me to see that (as far as I know) the only sets that are slated to get "extra" attention are the sets that lack snipes, which leads me to believe that yes, in fact the developers do consider the snipe buff to be a big deal, and they will take fast snipes into consideration when they evaluate sets that have a snipe. Sets that have both a snipe and crap attacks otherwise? They may very well be S.O.L. until the next balance pass, which may not occur till 2017.

I may be wrong; it may very well be that Arbiter Hawk is rolling up his sleeves as we speak to improve all sets on a case-by-case basis whether they have a snipe or not, but I can be forgiven for refusing to take that on faith.

In any case, if I-24 fast snipes are intended to be the catch-all single-target buff for snipe sets, as I suspect they are, then there's no reason that buff shouldn't apply more or less evenly for all ATs and all builds. There will always be special cases, unusually good synergies, but this binary, usable-or-not-in-the-midst-of-combat change to Snipes is a whole nother beast.

Yeah, I meant 400% total, or +300%. I prefer the total number, generally, because although it may not be intuitively obvious that the first 100% is free, the total number is more obviously relatable with the 500% cap number to which most of us have been exposed.

You need +300% recharge to get Freezing Rain's recharge time down to 15 seconds. You need something like +338% to get Freezing Rain's cycle time down to 15 seconds. Freezing Rain has a not-insignificant activation time, so if you want to double-stack the debuff on a technically "permable" basis, you need to reduce the power's recharge to about 13.7 seconds.

You may say that 2 seconds of downtime (on the double-stacked debuff) out of every 15 is insignificant in the grand scheme -- and I'd agree with you -- but in the interest of fairness (and in the interest of simplifying the math), the disclaimer is worth mentioning.

No, I say it as if I've played a game for eight years and noticed a relatively slow (read: glacial) pace of balance changes.

More to the point, your rebuttal is a non-sequitor.

Heh, assuming you can cast FR every 15 seconds (which, to be fair, is hard to do, build-wise; you'd need well over 400% total recharge), the comparison is even more lopsided. The RES debuff lasts for 30 seconds*, so in a protracted fight you could have a consistent -60% RES debuff.

(* - The last time I bothered paying attention, there was an odd bug with FR and Sleet that occasionally killed off the debuff after the last tick of the rain, cutting the debuff duration by half against the odd target.)

Yeah, the math isn't hard, but it's context-dependent. In other words, BU represents a smaller proportional boost as your other damage buffs rise (enhancements, Assault, IO bonuses, Musculature, Defiance, etc).

Hehe, I hear you. My bind for rain/placeable powers is shift+lclick, so if I hold down the shift button, I get the little placeable circle pulsing under my cursor (which makes it easier to find, btw), and then it's just a matter of pointing the cursor at the appropriate location, and clicking my left mouse button.

Works wonders. I can usually get the rain queued before the previous power has finished animating.

(Edit: And by that I don't mean to suggest that Gatecrasher should use my bind; UI preferences are a totally personal thing!)

I realize that the endurance cost of toggles and whatnot is usually smaller than the over-time cost of attacks, but in the interest of fairness, it's worth pointing out that Tankers get a higher SPE (Survivability Per Endurance).

Right or wrong, it's always been the case that lower-damage ATs have lower DPE. The attack formula is based on attacks' damage scale, not on their nominal damage output.

And yet it gives certain ATs disproportionate benefit.

Eight years.

A mistake is only a mistake in retrospect if you can demonstrate that the outcome was predictable at the time the decision was made. It's a fallacy to assume that a past choice was a bad one simply because a bad result followed. If I take a risk with a 10% chance of failure, and I happen to get unlucky, then am I a wantonly irresponsible idiot in retrospect?

We can only evaluate what we know at any given time. It should go without saying that any relevant developments going forward will change the landscape of this discussion.

Your play habits are irrelevant. The above quote represents a common theme in the Blaster debate, by the way; people seem to think that an AT's capabilities are an insignificant balance consideration simply because those people don't choose to make full use of those capabilities. If Defenders were given a 200% AT damage scalar, I'm sure someone would chime in to say that the AT's damage advantage is unimportant because all they do is spam debuffs and Neutrino Bolt.

An extreme example, I know, but sometimes the extreme case is illustrative.

So you think the existence of fast snipes doesn't affect the balance of Blaster single-target damage?

Yeah, I read Synapse's big PPM thread a couple of weeks ago after a lengthy break from the game. I understand the change in broad strokes, but I've resolved not to bother figuring out the math until after the new mechanics go live for all procs.

The only component of the PPM thing that I don't find intuitive is the AoE-Factor modifier. For the purpose of this discussion, we could ignore the AoE factor (just arbitrarily limit ourselves to single-target attacks), but even then, we'd still have to figure out what the enhanced (not practical) cycle time of each slotted attack is, as opposed to simply assuming that the proc is checked X number of times over a 10 second period.

So long story short, you may be right that the new proc mechanics aren't all that much more complicated in principle, but they'd add enough extra wrinkles to my back-of-the-napkin numbers that I thought the disclaimer was worthwhile.

Heh, I'm not necessarily a rational player either. For example, the amount of time I've spent trying to shoe-horn Afterburner on otherwise (and so-called) "optimized" builds is downright shameful.

And I don't necessarily disagree with you about Targeting Drone, either. Targeting Drone may even be harder to compare directly to Build Up than Freezing Rain is to compare to BU. It's one of those powers that can have a deceptively high qualitative value.

That's an interesting take -- the bit about Targeting Drone, I mean. A lot of people seem convinced that Build Up is better than Targeting Drone (again, ignoring for the sake of this discussion that TD is slated to give Devices access to perma-fast snipes in Issue 24).

I suppose I should just give up the ghost here; I'm not very good at feigning neutrality anyway. To me, it's clear the Freezing Rain is a more powerful singular option than Build Up. To me, the comparison isn't even close. Freezing Rain gives you a comparable damage boost (assuming you have a certain threshold of damage enhancement otherwise); Freezing Rain increases your whole team's damage against the relevant targets, and Freezing Rain's debuff is more-or-less permanently sustainable with very little effort, whereas the best-case uptime (at the recharge cap) on Build Up is 10 / (90 / 5) = 55%.

Freezing Rain's control effects and the Defense debuff (which effectively moots Build Up's ToHit buff except in edge cases) are icing.

But I find the question interesting because Freezing Rain and Build Up, for all that they share a similar broad purpose (boosting damage), are difficult to compare objectively. Particularly for Blasters, Build Up can be said to represent a play style as much as it represents a mechanical benefit. So although the on-paper comparison favors Freezing Rain, I'm honestly not sure how people will respond to the question; there are conceivably builds for which Build Up is a better fit.

On the other hand, and at the risk of leaning towards controversy, it's also conceivable that certain respondents will refuse to divorce themselves from their character concept (for which Freezing Rain may not seem appropriate) long enough to consider the question practically.

Or a slower, stronger, mega-Fireball. (Or perhaps more importantly, huge supplemental AoE debuffs/controls for some Defenders.) It's all in how you look at it.

Nuke powers are no longer nuke powers in the sense that there's no major downside for using them. Thematically, I'm sure that bothers some people; without a crash, the nukes lose some of their apocalyptic last-resort flavor.

On the other hand, I think some are objecting to the damage loss in part because they don't fully appreciate just how much more user-friendly nukes will be in Issue 24. It's one thing to know the abstract power details; it's another thing to have lived with something one way, for years, and then learn to appreciate a dramatic change on an intuitive level.

Mechanically, nukes will be buffed in Issue 24. It's not even a question. Whatever damage is lost on a per-use basis is more than made up by the decreased cycle time -- even if we ignore the crash. If we don't ignore the crash, then nukes' per-use damage output also becomes less important, from a practical standpoint; if you no longer have to retoggle, and you no longer have to pop blues to fight a recovery debuff, then you're in a better position to kill anything that survives the nuke.

Fair enough, but for the sake of clarity: the question had nothing to do with Aim. In our hypothetical scenario, you would keep any powers in your Primary set. The question asks simply whether you would trade Build Up directly for Freezing Rain.

Build Up's proposed effect on Snipes in I-24 is also irrelevant for the purpose of this hypothetical. Just power to power, which would you prefer?

Nope. He asked me to "pole" the forum. I was just quoting my interrogator.

(I take no responsibility for the double entendre!)

I don't believe it's a demand either, but fast-snipes aren't a quality of life improvement. What you can say is that they're an improvement over the old Snipe mechanics, but those aren't synonymous statements.

In other words, if you can get perma fast snipes, then you will experience an improvement in your mechanical performance and (apart from the initial investment to get perma-fast snipes in the first place) you will receive that mechanical improvement conveniently. If you cannot get perma fast snipes, if you can only leverage them inconsistently, then you will also receive a (somewhat smaller) mechanical improvement, but you will have to put up with some inconvenience in return for it. Fast snipes do not force people to inconvenience themselves, but the mechanic can't be described as a convenience, either.

(* - Dominators who don't invest in Psy Mastery will generally not fall into either group. ToHit buffs are so difficult to come by for that Archetype that fast snipes are unlikely to affect them much at all.)

On the other hand, as things stand right now and if I understand the numbers correctly, the fast snipe does represent a signficant single-target-damage buff to Blasters, even if those Blasters can only leverage fast snipes on a temporary basis. That's either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. People who care about their single-target damage will likely feel like they have to pick up the snipe now.

The first is my guess.

Irrelevant. If the Snipes exist in fast-snipe form, then the developers must take them into account when they look at single-target-damage balance. That the snipes are inconsistently available muddies the waters, but it doesn't mean that the devs will ignore the existence of fast snipes (IE. "the numbers") for the purpose of determining intra-set and intra-AT balance.

Holy distortion, Batman. How do you get from, "I see no reason that support ATs should receive more benefit from the Snipe change than Blasters," to, "The Snipe change makes support ATs unreservedly better than Blasters?"

Yes, I feel the overall balance of the game (right now, before fast-snipes) heavily favors Corrupters over Blasters. Yes. I feel that in some instances, Corrupters do too much damage relative to Blasters, given their other advantages. I feel that Blasters are not strong soloers and not strong teamers and are generally the most reliant-on-external-influences AT in the entire game. You obviously disagree, which means that you might as well be from a different planet; we're unlikely to agree about anything, ever, with respect to game balance. We're scarcely speaking the same language.

The fact that you think a buff to a single-target attack is not designed to be a buff to single-target damage sort of drives home the irreconcilability of your perspective with mine. But hey, this isn't new: earlier someone else bizarrely insisted that the balance of single-target damage is unimportant in a discussion centering around a single-target attack, and he's still flailing around trying to justify himself. I leave it to the reader (all two of them still following this thread) to decide which of our positions is more rational.

What I hate is when I get accused of opposite sins in the course of the same conversation. First I was looking too much at the surrounding context for the Snipe changes (see quote below). Now I'm guilty of looking at the Snipe change in a vacuum. Both accusations can't be true, which leads me to infer that neither is.

All of those buffs you mention (with the exception of one as far as I'm aware), apply equally to Defenders/Corrupters/Blasters. So if your intent here was to imply that I'm some sort of petulant ingrate for ignoring such a massive list of Blaster improvements, you've sadly failed. Bonus points for counting the nuke buff at least twice to lengthen your list, though!

The buff to Dual Pistols is particularly instructive, because one must assume that part of the reason for the DP buff is that other sets are getting fast snipes.

This quote, by the way, is not at all what I think, and more accurately defines the position you've chosen, whether you realize it or not. The poor support ATs deserve an extra toy, donchaknow.

I'm not off-the-top-of-my-head familiar with the PPM math, but here's a breakdown using the old, and soon-to-be-defunct system (and assuming I'm remembering correctly):

If you have one proc check per ten second period, then you'll have 20% uptime, or 4% over-time RES. (Duh; the pre-PPM proc has a 20% chance to fire, and if you're spacing each check over a 10-second period, then you shouldn't have any risk of overlap).

If you have two proc checks per 10 second period, then you'll have 10 / (10 + (4 * 5)) = 33.3% uptime, or 0.333 * 0.2 = 6.66% over-time RES.

If you have three proc checks per 10 second period, then you'll have 10 / (10 + (4 * 3.33)) = 42.8% uptime, or about 8.57% over-time RES debuff.

If you have four proc checks per 10 second period, then you'll have 10 / (10 + (4 * 2.5)) = 50% uptime, or about 10% over-time RES debuff.

If you have five proc checks per 10 second period, then you'll have 10 / (10 + (4 * 2)) = 55.5% uptime, or about 11.1% over-time RES debuff.

Etc, etc. Realistically, the best uptime you're going to get on the proc is about 71.4% (that's 10 proc checks per ten second period, or an attack rate of once per second), which corresponds to about 14.3% in over-time RES.

After the PPM changes go through, the calculation will become much more complicated; generally, the faster you can leverage the proc (the faster your cycle time on each relevant power), the less chance it will have to fire per proc check. In sum: I doubt very much that the numbers above are going to change in players' favor.