Pippy

[ QUOTE ]
If I can use rest after every fight (even if I only need to use it after every three or four), I can fight all out; use all my attacks without any thought towards which ones cost more endurance; toss that AoE out at one target rather than wait for a single target attack to recharge. I can slot all damage/recharge enhancements and probably skip a lot of other end management powers and/or forgo other end management techniques. I can just take a knee between fights whenever I want.

[/ QUOTE ]

And taking a knee between every fight would add about 20 seconds to each fight. If you're spending, say, a minute on each spawn (and that seems to be a reasonable estimate for the lower levels) then your end-hog playstyle still results in a 33% increase in mission completion time. Not to mention the fact that playing like that would quite possibly cause you to run dry in the middle of a tough fight. While you could use the strategery you just outlined and ignore end management options, it seems pretty clear that you'd be running slower than someone who did use a more endurance-friendly build and/or playstyle.

The scenario I was basically thinking about is when you've just finished a spawn and are thinking of going on to the next spawn with less than full health/endo. If you have enough to make it through the next fight, you're always better off not resting.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Has anyone got an actual argument for a high recharge on rest?

[/ QUOTE ]

Dont know how sound an arguement this is, but it's the first thing that jumped to mind: Rest has a high recharge so as players do not learn to rely upon it.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's a fair argument. The counterpoint is that Rest comes with sufficient other penalties -- long activation time, defensive vulnerability, elimination of any offensive output -- that a high recharge is unnecessary.

It's also a question as to why relying on Rest (given its negatives) would be worse than relying on Stamina or endrx slotting (given the absence of any negatives other than opportunity costs). As I've said before, you're always better off not resting except in those situations where not resting makes a trip to the hospital likely.

[ QUOTE ]
Is "The Power whose name can not be mentioned" some kind of bizarre mystical force where simply mentioning it forces all who read it to engage in debate as to its merits? Considering the purpose of the thread was to discuss the pre-20 levels, a debate on a power you can't get until 20 is horribly off-topic.

[/ QUOTE ]

Good point. The viability of slotting choices/IO-sets/playstyle as means for pre-20 end management and the merits or demerits of reducing the recharge on rest would seem to me to be the most relevant to the thread. Or at least to what I originally intended the thread to be. (The other 3 choices are probably harder to balance and wouldn't really accomplish anything that reducing the recharge on rest couldn't, so I'm just as happy that those have fallen by the wayside.)

[ QUOTE ]
And seriously, what is it with the "Fun" trump card? Anytime anyone wants to enforce their argument about why certain things should be done certain ways, they pull out the Fun card and go "it's simply not fun that way". If we add up all these Fun cards, we'll find the game only becomes "fun" when everyone starts out at level 50 at full power and never have to engage in any kind of challenge or be forced to think or use strategy. "If I have to actually strategize or pace myself or in any way think, then that's simply not fun!"

[/ QUOTE ]

Look, reducing the recharge on Rest doesn't enforce my idea of fun on anyone else. It's the pro-status-quo faction that is trying to enforce its idea of fun by preventing rest from being up when I'd like to use it. There's nothing keeping you from waiting as long as you want to use rest, there's nothing that's stopping you from, well, not using it.

As far as the "slow pace = challenge" straw man, I've already discussed that, and don't want to belabor the point too much. Suffice it to say that the faster pace in the mid-to-late-game in no way diminishes the necessity for strategery or planning, and in no way diminishes the overall challenge. I consider the "you just don't want the game to be on easy mode" argument to be extraordinarily ill-posed; in fact it's really more of a baseless assertion than an argument. Unless, of course, you could defend the proposition that tedium implies difficulty.

[ QUOTE ]
The only reason you think there's anything wrong with pre-20 is because you're used to post-20. Newcomers have no preconceptions about how the game should work and won't know any different until they get to SOs and Stamina.

[/ QUOTE ]

Let me rephrase this: the only reason I think there's anything wrong with pre-20 is because I've found out how much better it is after 20.

You can live perfectly well on peanut butter sandwiches. (And I have, although mixing it up with bologne or ramen noodles on occasion...) You might even think peanut butter sandwiches are perfectly good. But if you get the chance to eat a really good steak, you suddenly realize what you've been missing all that time.

I'm not saying that steak is required -- clearly there are other options, like lobster or a really good lamb roast. I'm not saying everyone should get steak at level 1. And I'm sure not saying that everyone should get steak for free. I'm just saying, maybe upgrade from PB&J to, say, meatloaf. Then, when you finally do get to go out for a real meal, it's less likely to ruin your appetite if you have to go back to the pre-20 food for a bit.

[ QUOTE ]
While we are bringing up the good old days when we had 10-minute Rest timers...

[/ QUOTE ]

To be fair, they've also made a number of changes to individual powersets, which have almost all been in the direction of reducing endurance costs. Dark Armor for sure, and I want to say SR and maybe a couple others have gotten some love. On top of the across-the-board discount that came with ED.

Hmmm... so... if I were going to disingenuously use this to support my position, I'd probably say that they've been moving in the direction of easier end-management, and that doing what I'm saying here would be further progress in that direction. Or something like that...

[ QUOTE ]
The trick is to grab endurance reduction from the IOs that aren't as much in demand.

[/ QUOTE ]

In principle, this is a good idea, and makes life a lot easier for a lot of builds. But it's by no means a universal panacea. I'm finding right now that most of the characters I'm leveling don't have slottable secondary effects on most of their attacks, or at least the attacks I've taken (fire/dark scrapper, storm/sonic def, fire/fire blaster, although not as much end trouble with this last if I use the ST attack chain, because the damage is so sick). So IO's make it easier for some builds to manage endurance, but others are left out in the cold.

Reducing the recharge on Rest establishes a baseline below which nobody can fall.

Replacing Siphon Power with Hasten is counterproductive from an endurance standpoint -- each attack will do less dpe, and you'll be attacking more often. The major culprit here is probably Fire Cages -- from the damage slotting, it looks like you're using it as one of your damage dealers. It's a real end hog, and does pretty piddly damage. You'd actually probably be better off dropping it in favor of Hot Feet. Or better yet, a high dpe pool attack. (Flurry is a surprisingly good choice here -- it's got a really long activation time, so it's lousy dps, but it's the best dpe of any pool attack. At least it was when last I checked.)

[ QUOTE ]
CoX is already a very fast pace game.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's way faster at 50 than it is at 10.

Heck, for most of my toons, it's considerably faster at 21 than it is at 19. What's wrong with making the low-level game as dynamic as it is at high levels? It's entirely possible to maintain the same pace (i.e. by eliminating pointless downtime) while still providing a sense of character growth. It's not like the game's over when I get stamina and SO-strength endrx slotting.

It's really more like the game's finally started.

[ QUOTE ]
Some characters suffer from "resting" too much? Exactly which sets are you talking about? Radiation?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not entirely clear what you're saying here. My point was that lowering the recharge on Rest doesn't hurt anybody, and that it's better to avoid resting unless you need to rest in order to ensure that you'll survive the next fight. The second of these is a matter of mathematically provable fact, and the first strikes me as fairly non-controversial.

Also, you pointing out ways to manage your endurance in the early game. I appreciate that, but I don't really need advice on this. I've been playing for close to five years now, and I know how to manage my blue bar at any level as well as it can be managed. My point is simply that, for a lot of builds, particularly if the focus is solo play, the options available for managing endurance in the early game are insufficient to prevent endurance management from being an unpleasant chore, and that the unpleasant nature of this chore could be easily mitigated by very simple steps such as lowering the recharge on rest.

[ QUOTE ]
To manage endurance, I do a few things....

[/ QUOTE ]

All the following suggestions are excellent, and should be required reading for new players. I'm not a new player, though, and everything you suggest is part of my normal playing style. (Except for early IO-set slotting -- I've not generally had good luck finding low-level IO sets at good prices, but I haven't been looking that hard.)

The reason that I started this thread in the first place is that for a significant number of characters, you can employ all of those strategeries and still suffer from what is, to me, an unacceptable amount of down time due to endurance burn. (As you allude to in number 5, health-related downtime is potentially a factor of 4 larger. That doesn't really affect the argument, except insofar as it provides further support for the idea of reducing the recharge on Rest.) This is especially the case when soloing.

Basically, if I have to sit around doing nothing for more than about 15-20 seconds, I'm going to get bored and start doing something else -- maybe browse the forums, maybe mess around on youtube, who knows? Perhaps my attention span is too short. Using Rest enforces 10-20 seconds of down time due to activation time and then the time letting the bars refill. So the down-time associated with Rest is, as far as I'm concerned, close to the maximum that I find tolerable before my enjoyment starts to wane. As far as I'm concerned, then, the ideal situation would be to go with instant recharge on Rest and be done with it. If you have a longer attention span than I do, or team more, or, for whatever reason, you're okay with the status quo, then you lose nothing by having Rest recharge faster. Those of us that aren't happy with the amount of downtime we experience in the low levels -- and I'm quite sure I'm not the only one with this problem -- would, however, benefit from a faster recharge.

I understand there may be a certain amount of devil's advocacy in your post. That said, a few thoughts:

[ QUOTE ]
Rest provides a punitive function in the game, sloppy health and/or endurance management is never "beaten" out of new players and will eventually catch up with them.

[/ QUOTE ]

Debt does this rather well. Sloppy health management is just as likely to send you to the ER as it is to leave you needing to wait around for Rest to recharge.

[ QUOTE ]
An easy out for endurance issues early devalues tough decisions on slotting (should I take dmg or recharge or end redux.)

[/ QUOTE ]

This probably the strongest argument. However, the ubiquity of IO sets seems to indicate that the devs are moving away from tough decisions on slotting, at least for those who can afford to have it all. (Which is pretty much everyone who's willing to wait for it.)

It's also worth mentioning that using Rest, even with instant recharge, imposes a penalty: you can't possibly do any damage when you're resting. And if there's anything around you that might be hostile, you'll probably have a long run back from the ER. (Of course, that's a full health/end heal -- clearly the "Go to Hospital" button needs a longer recharge!)

[ QUOTE ]
If rest recharge were shortened, I'd never get my wife to stop using brawl on every fight.

[/ QUOTE ]

I got nothing on this one...

[ QUOTE ]
The change would overly favor high damage oriented archetypes, because they can play as fast at a higher level of risk for more reward if they have constant easy out for damage taken and endurance spent.

[/ QUOTE ]

Your example notwithstanding, in general this isn't true. Low damage ATs have to spend more endurance per point of damage that they inflict, and therefore are more likely to be hurting for endurance than higher-damage ATs.

[ QUOTE ]
I've started a fire/mind blaster. He runs about as fast as my claws/wp new character. If he had rest after each encounter, he would open with fireball and firebreath every time and likely raise his notoriety and still move through mobs faster than the claws/wp character.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm going to assume that your fire/mind plays similarly to my fire/fire. In general, the problem with (fire) blasters isn't kill speed, it's survivability. My AoEs let me throw out orange numbers that are far beyond what my DB/WP was doing at a similar level (with DB and claws being actually pretty similar in damage output). He runs through mobs super quick. He's also way more likely to get debt than my scrapper would be, if I weren't more likely to try stupid stuff on my scrapper.

Actually, I take that back. I try plenty of stupid stuff on my blaster too. Especially if I've been playing my scrapper a lot...

[ QUOTE ]
Says who?

[/ QUOTE ]

Per Castle, "lots" of characters take Stamina. Exactly what percentage this entails I don't know, but it's safe to assume it's pretty high. Since Stamina obviously doesn't provide any benefit to a character that already has enough endurance, I would consider taking Stamina to be reasonably compelling evidence of endurance issues.

Given that (a) non-Stamina options for endurance management become more powerful post-20 and (b) taking Stamina at 20 requires a substantial investment in character development (3 powers out of 12 total powers available at level 20) I would further contend that taking Stamina at level 20 is a very strong indication of endurance issues pre-20. I don't have hard numbers for you -- I wish I did. But I'm fairly confident that the number of characters that take Stamina (or a comparable power, like Quick Recovery) as soon as it becomes available is not small.

[ QUOTE ]
Hardcore players tend to want everything in their way. They want stamina-free, 100% hitting rate, or maybe i-WIN button if they can get it... I think what you want is Endurance-free right?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not sure where you're getting this from. Since I've not asked for free Stamina -- in fact I explicitly said that I DON'T want free Stamina -- I can only assume that this straw man is a result of frustration stemming from previous discussions of endurance issues. Be that as it may, it's pretty clear that it's not a fair criticism of anything I've propounded here.

[ QUOTE ]
I consider having a bit of endurance problem and not having much problem a "progress". I create a character that actually "grows". Yes, this means I go from resting often to not resting at all. I buy sets so I rarely rest. I carefully plan my build so I don't rest much. I do that because my character actually GROWS.

[/ QUOTE ]

Non sequitur. Designing a game in such a way that character progression is obvious and satisfying does not demand forced down-time in the early game. Also, I'd be perfectly happy to progress from resting often to not needing to rest at all. Unfortunately, its long recharge precludes the possibility of resting often.

Once again, I'll ask how anything you've said shows why reducing the recharge on Rest is a bad idea.

[ QUOTE ]
Anyone else remember when Rest had a 20 minute recharge? I think I had it like 4 slotted back on my first character when I started playing in I4.

[/ QUOTE ]

At release it was a 10 minute recharge. Not quite as bad as a 20 minute, but still pretty bad.

Nethergoat's "Back in my day we had to run through the snow uphill both ways to our missions and by God we were grateful for it" notwithstanding, I'd still be pretty interested in hearing any argument for why lowering the recharge on Rest would be bad. The only argument I've heard is that there are enough alternatives to using Rest that lowering the recharge is unnecessary, which is a completely different situation.

Not to mention that said alternatives are in general less viable at lower levels, which is precisely the situation I'm whining about.

Regarding lowering/eliminating the endurance costs on Brawl:

I for one wouldn't see endurance-free six-slotted Brawl with a bunch of procs in it as particularly unbalancing. That might seem strange on its face, but I think you have to look at this in the context of the opportunity cost of such a power.

First of all, most lowbies aren't going to be able to pick up a bunch of procs -- they're not cheap! Secondly -- and stop me if I'm wrong here, I'm not checking this too closely -- since Brawl is just straight-up ST damage with no slottable secondary effects, there aren't too many procs you could use. ToD+Hecatomb, and then the chance for KD from Kinetic Combat (I think) would be about all you could add, right? Compare that to what you can do with, say, Gambler's Cut, Neutrino Bolt, etc., and Brawl as a proc-mule doesn't look quite as good. Furthermore, by the time you get far enough in to have collected all of this stuff, you're probably well past the point where endurance management is an issue for most builds. Also, you have to look at the opportunity cost -- 5 slots in Brawl is five slots you can't use elsewhere. I think it might be interesting to make Brawl sufficiently attractive that slotting it up could be a worthwhile choice. It would add more choices, more diversity, and I'm having trouble imagining any particularly game-breaking scenario that would arise as a result. (I'd be very interested to be proven wrong on this though...)

Be that as it may, it's completely unclear to me why Brawl should have a DPE which is so much worse than just a normal attack. At the very least, given Brawl's weakness, it shouldn't be an end-hog as well.

(QR)

[ QUOTE ]
I really don't see a big issue with endurance before stamina.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, but lots of other players do.

I'm certainly not going to come out and say that everyone has problems with endurance management pre-20 -- that's manifestly not the case. By the same token, the fact that some people do not have problems managing their endurance in the early game does not necessarily imply that the status quo is perfectly fine. Enough people do seem to have problems with it, and it's a sufficiently unfun form of challenge to those that do have to deal with it that it seems pretty clear to me that it could use a little bit of attention.

My own experience is that I'm generally fine on endurance -- i.e., I don't run dry before Rest recharges -- when I'm teaming. When I'm solo, though, I either have to spend time standing around between individual attacks, or spend more time standing around between fights. Either way, I personally find it to be an irritating time sink rather than a challenge. (I don't think I'm alone in that opinion.) So I guess I would be curious as to how much those that are not having end problems are running solo vs. teaming.

I'd also have to ask who would be hurt with a shorter recharge on Rest. The 1-20 game is a comparatively small fraction of the total 1-50 game, timewise, so reducing down-time here isn't going to suddenly make people zip to 50 five times quicker. (In fact, I'd probably roll even more alts if the lowbie game were more enjoyable to me.) I've heard that it would make regen, empaths, and other stuff that can provide +regen/+recov less attractive, but I don't think that argument holds water: rest is (except in some extreme corner cases) useless in combat, and takes a pretty long time even to activate in the first place.

So what arguments are there against lowering the recharge on Rest, other than that wouldn't be necessary for some characters who are okay on endurance already?

[ QUOTE ]
1. Don't do anything at relentless or even ruthless and waste a lot of endurance by missing.

[/ QUOTE ]

In general, missing doesn't become a major endurance drain with sufficient accuracy slotting. Which isn't too hard to get.

[ QUOTE ]
2. Don't bother with +dmg. Just +acc and -end if endurance is such a big issue.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's not necessarily entirely good advice. Damage increases dpe exactly as much as -end does, but it also increases dps.

In general, I'd slot accuracy first, damage second, then endurance as needed, with the rest going to recharge. The problem is that at the low levels, you don't necessarily have the slots (or the money!) to get that much benefit past the accuracy slotting.

[ QUOTE ]
Just don't waste attacks if you don't need to. I've seen people wasting heavy hits on a target that only has 5% health left. Just wait for the tier 1 to cycle back. It doesn't take that long.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is true, but I really don't think that pre-20 endurance problems can be entirely chalked up to using Cremate instead of Scorch.

[ QUOTE ]
Rest often.

[/ QUOTE ]

See #1 in the OP.

Okay, so I know that this comes up pretty regularly, but usually in the form of "GIEV ME STAMINA NAO 4 FREE!!!" threads. I'd like to stay away from that, and instead look at the possibility of making the 1-19 game a little easier on the blue bar. As has been pointed out ad nauseum, there are tons of ways to mitigate endurance usage: accolades, Stamina and other +recovery/+end powers, slotting for endrx, IO sets, etc.

However, most of these tend to be much less effective in the early game. Consequently, I find that when I'm soloing, I am continually having serious endurance problems -- generally seem to have to stop and wait to recover about every other fight, fighting on tenacious or rugged. (I like my bosses to be bosses, thank you.) While one could maybe make a case that there's nothing wrong with this, or that I should lern2playn00b, I doubt I'm the only one that has a problem with the status quo.

(Along similar lines, waiting around for the green bar to regenerate is also pretty aggravating. Quite simply, the downtime that seems to be a necessary part of the pre-20 game strikes me as an unnessecary time-sink, and is for me at least something of a barrier to leveling up lowbie alts. At least for me -- YMMV.)

So, with that said, here are a couple possibilities for ways to make the early game a little more endurance friendly for your average soloist:

1.) Reduce (or eliminate) the recharge on Rest.

I have a hard time with arguments that this would enable exploits, simply because it's impossible to contribute to XP-gain while you're in Rest. Similarly, the long activation time enforces a non-trivial amount of down-time -- to go from blinking-red to full health generally takes 15-20 seconds. I'd argue that this is close to the maximum amount of downtime you can have before boredom sets in.

A short (<30-60 s) recharge on rest would be balanced by your vulnerability while resting. In general, regardless of the recharge on Rest, you're always better not resting, except when not resting would lead to a trip to the ER. So I can't agree with the argument that balance requires a long recharge on Rest.

2.) Zero endurance use for Brawl (and possibly the origin inherents.)

Other MMOs have a free "auto-attack" that you can always use, regardless of whether or not you have any "mana" or whatever left -- WoW always lets you take a normal swing with your basic weapons, for example. One of the reasons why running out of endurance is so problematic in CoX is the fact that you absolutely can't do anything when the blue bar is empty. Making Brawl an endurance-free attack would allow you to maintain at least some offensive output even when you're out of endurance, albeit at a greatly reduced level. While making CoX like other MMOs is not a desirable goal in and of itself, I think this is one area in which it could be useful.

3.) Longer duration on toggle pulses.

Along similar lines, suppose that toggles continued to provide defense for, say, 4-5 seconds after they shut off -- perhaps at a reduced level. (I'm pretty sure there are straightforward ways to implement this with current game mechanics.) In this way, you'd have a few seconds to respond to endurance drain before your defenses shut down.

4.) Endurance discount at low levels.

Basically just like doing for endurance what they already did for accuracy. Pretty straightforward in concept, not sure how easy it would be to implement.

I'm not suggesting that all of these be added -- that would probably be overkill. If it were entirely up to me, I'd use some form of 1 and 2, as I'm sort of less enthusiastic about 3 and 4.

What do y'all think?

Thoroughly enjoyed the Teen Phalanx arc. I'll have to try out Axis and Allies once I get a villain up to higher levels -- doesn't seem right doing it blueside. :P

Anyways, I'd love a review of my arc when/if you get a chance:

The Paragon Caper (65246).

[ QUOTE ]
even in PvE those enemies who summon pets will now be more difficult to deal with

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, they'll both be pretty tough...

[ QUOTE ]
I never made such a claim.

[/ QUOTE ]

I wasn't being snarky with you. It was PBAoE snark. Or something.


[ QUOTE ]
It does occur to me, though, that if you use Siphon Speed to debuff the recharge of a boss, that it would stand to reason it would work on an enemy pet as well, right? Next thing you know we have angry forumites demanding to know why their Siphon Speed doesn't do anything to fire imps.

[/ QUOTE ]

Realistically, I doubt many people will notice whether or not their enemies are affected by -recharge. The -speed component will still work, and that's the noticeable part of most slows, even if it's not always as useful as -recharge.

Your point is well-taken regarding logical consistency. But -- as Castle's pretty much come right out and said -- this is a workaround, not a particularly elegant solution. Given infinite time and resources, I'm sure they could come up with something much better. Given a more intelligently-written code base, I'm sure they could come up with something much better.

But it sounds like this is the best they can do with what they have. If they say "We don't like this change, but we don't have any alternatives," then I'm inclined to believe them.

[ QUOTE ]
[Kinetics] Does not have a -recharge. What was your point here?

[/ QUOTE ]

Not that I disagree with you at all, but doesn't Siphon Speed have -recharge? Without which, of course, the entire set is now useless.

[ QUOTE ]
At what point does a Stormy have "plenty of +Rec and EndRed"? LOL.

[/ QUOTE ]

Touche.

[ QUOTE ]
That's how I came up with my rough estimate of 20s as the break-even point.

[/ QUOTE ]

Gotcha.

[ QUOTE ]
But most of the other side effects powers get such as KB, -END, -Rec and so on don't cost extra END

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, but not multiple secondary effects. Energy blast gets KB; elec gets -end/-rec; rad gets -def, etc. But getting more than one of these at a time in a ranged damage power isn't all that common. (Melee powers don't look like they follow the dpe rule that closely -- any maybe the ranged powers don't either once you're at high damage. Haven't looked to carefully, to be honest.) Bitter Ice Blast, for example, does have -tohit on top of the normal ice Slows -- it also looks like it costs 5.7 end per DS instead of 5.2.

The free AoE I'd give you here -- 5 feet is a pretty small radius.

[ QUOTE ]
It's 2.4s vs the 1.65s from just Hasten.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, it's a lot easier to tell the difference between 2.8 sec and 5.2 sec than it is to tell the difference between 3.6 sec and 5.2 sec, I would think.

To a certain extent, the actual numbers might be less relevant to the perception of how fast it's firing. For example, could you tell offhand the difference between a 2-minute and a 3-minute recharge? If I was doing something else, I probably couldn't without a clock, and that's a full 60-second difference!

A five second recharge is long enough that I'm not really thinking about how long it's been since the last bolt. Under three seconds, I'd probably be more like "Didn't that just fire?!" The 3.6 second cycle time with Hasten up is apparently long enough that I'm not really paying attention any more. Then again, I'm pretty easily distr... Ooooh, shiny!

[ QUOTE ]
It's probably not the norm, but it's any IO user (and LS is an L32+ power) with Hasten - hardly a rare build, which I'm guessing is why LS is getting targeted for a nerf.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's an IO Set user with Hasten -- as I understand it, regular recharge IOs don't make a difference. (I definitely would've noticed my 95% recharge on top of the Hasten. Not to mention that I did end up timing it and it only got the buff from Hasten. This was with no set slotting.)

That's probably a much smaller fraction of characters -- personally, I don't even start getting sets until level 37, unless I can get some real cheap stuff.

[ QUOTE ]
I recorded damage numbers when testing Audrey...

[/ QUOTE ]

Interesting results. The metric that I would use, though, is mission completion time: in addition to animation time, etc., there are a number of other issues that tend to dilute the effect of +recharge: moving between spawns and switching targets within one spawn being the major contributors that I can think of right now, So rerunning the same mission multiple times and timing how long it takes -- which you can do without actually completing the mission if you get a glowie radio mish without actually collecting the glowie -- should help to correct for these effects, right? It's not a perfect test, but it's a solid methodology. (Basically datamining on a small scale.)

[ QUOTE ]
The improved AI offsets a good portion of the nerf. But I can't attribute the AI improvement in this case to the recharge ignorance, since Twitchy misbehaves on live even with no +Rech anywhere.

[/ QUOTE ]

That raises an interesting question: were there other "under-the-hood" AI changes that weren't discussed in the patch notes? Or was the recharge issue somehow messing up the AI even when there was no +recharge? If it's the former, then it doesn't seem like it would be possible to simultaneously isolate the effects of the change while also accounting for the other factors that determine average killing speed. If it's the second, well, I guess that would shoot down some of the alternatives that have been presented.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
What one could do ([color= yellow]if Recharge obeys its StrMax[/color], not everything has always obeyed all its caps) is to make a copy of minion_Pets (call it player_Pets or something), change their RechargeTime StrMax to 1, and make all player summoned pets create player_Pets instead of minion_Pets. This could be done instead of making pets summoned by NPCs using different powers than the ones our pets use (in order to make them affected by Recharge debuffs).

This way Recharge debuffs would work both in PvE and PvP.


In addition to this (and even if making a copy/changing pets would be unfeasible), one could change the RechargeTime StrMax of Minion_Henchman, Lt_Henchman and Boss_Henchman (the classes used by MM henchmen) to 1. Assuming that works, Recharge debuffs would work against them in PvP.

[/ QUOTE ]

Seems like I had a definite duh-moment [color= yellow]there[/color]. I've been reminded that Recharge *does* obey its StrMax, something I've even used before...

Anyway, that'd seem to remove most of the "ifs" from this idea.

[/ QUOTE ]

Something else that comes up in regards to this solution: at what levels of pet recharge does the AI start to go funky? Because if they're okay at, say, +20%, then couldn't you just set the max to 1.2? You still get some benefit from recharge buffs, the AI still behaves itself, and the whole RIP thing, while not totally fixed, becomes much less of an issue. Unless I'm misunderstanding something.

I guess this is still kind of a kludge. But maybe a slightly friendlier one.

[ QUOTE ]
The difference with just Hasten is 1.65 seconds, how could you not notice that?

[/ QUOTE ]

Because I had more important things to be paying attention to?

[ QUOTE ]
Ignoring the fact that the first shot occurs at the same time and discrete issues, a 60% increase in firing rate will result in 60% more shots in any given time increment. When you factor in the first shot, the percentage decrease from the nerf is lower the shorter the time. This is a pretty small effect.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's only a small effect in long fights. In short fights, it's the same order as the effect of the nerf itself -- hardly non-negligible.

[ QUOTE ]
However, the issue really is the END cost. If it's not worth casting for a 10s fight now - and it isn't - then the damage reduction due to this nerf is 100% for that case, while in a 30s fight - where it is worth casting - is necessarily less than that.

[/ QUOTE ]

Maybe a clearer way of looking at this would be to ask at what point, for a given level of recharge, casting LS does become worth its endurance use. That will depend on a number of other factors -- overall EndRx slotting, set bonuses, power selection, etc. -- so it's not clear that there's a simple answer to that question.

That said, if we use the normal attack dpe of 5.2/DS (i.e. a 1 damage scale attack uses 5.2 end, a 2 DS attack uses 10.4, etc.), then LS (which uses 31.2 end) needs to fire 6 times to be as endurance-efficient as a normal attack. (This isn't entirely a fair comparison -- the LS attack has a small AoE and multiple secondary effects: KB,-end, -recovery.) With no recharge, it takes 31 seconds to hit the break-even point; with Hasten, it needs to be firing for 21 seconds, and with +150% recharge, it breaks even after 17 seconds. (Apologies if you've already been through this; this thread is long enough now that I've lost track of who's said what.)

I'm not sure that this necessarily means "it's not worth casting" if it's not going to get to fire 6 times -- sometimes the most efficient use of endurance isn't necessarily the best, especially if you have plenty of +recovery or endrx.

Part of the problem is that reducing recharge is in general not supposed to increase dpe -- only dps. LS as it now stands on live basically gets double bonuses from +recharge: you can get more of them out (increasing dps) and they fire faster (further increasing dps, meaning that +recharge does more to increase damage than +damage does!) which also means that each individual storm fires more times (increasing dpe). Recharge bonuses are doing triple duty here, and that's a balance problem. Not because it's overpowered now, but because the fact that it benefits synergistically from recharge bonuses may very well mask the power's current weakness.