Siolfir

Shush, you! Don't you know that Controllers are the end-all, be-all archetype that all others shall try but fail to emulate their awesomeness?

I asked about reducing the animation time of Placate while I was asking about getting rid of the interrupt from Assassin's Strike entirely (I had a nice little list). The animation time issues are outside of the control of the powers team since it ties up the animators - which is also why I suspect that the normalization of the Assassin's Strike animations will happen well after i22. Maybe Placate can be revisited at the same time.

Burst damage is only meaningful if it is sufficient to kill the target immediately, so these statements are contradictory. You either want burst (and therefore, your best burst damage power in Assassin's Strike) or you don't. If you don't have time to set up for it, then get to the spawn before the rest of the team.

And lowering the DPA of the following attack by using Placate before it is a reduction in how quickly you are capable of dealing damage, regardless of what time frame you're looking at.

Look at it this way, using qualitative analysis: DPA (and DPS) = damage / time. Time to kill a mob = mob hp / DPS. With Placate damage goes up, but time goes up more, extending your "burst window". Your overall DPA (DPS) goes down and you take longer to deal the same amount of damage required to kill the target. That's not exactly helping your burst damage by taking more time to kill the same target.

No. It means it decays slower if you're constantly on the move, and you aren't losing it as quickly while a long attack is animating. The gain rate was also lowered to make it more difficult to reach very high levels of Fury, so on average the +damage provided is generally lower - you just reach a plateau faster and stay there longer.

Castle posted about it in a thread on the beta section during open beta that he was trying to aim for 65 Fury being fairly easily obtainable by all sets when adjusting the gain and decay rates, with higher values being possible as you were being swarmed by more things.

I've made the mistake of thinking things like this are common knowledge before on these forums.

Yes, I expected a lot of people to get it. But I've been disappointed before at what I thought were obvious references that went completely over people's heads. Thus, the footnote.

I tend to agree with this, which is part of the reason that if I were trying to fix the melee AT balance I'd completely gut the system and only have two ATs.

Tankers and Brutes would be rolled into one and get Tanker defense modifiers and Brute damage and hit points modifiers with Fury, a 600% damage cap (lower than the current 675% for Brutes, plus it gives Tankers their "400%" cap with Fury adding up to +200%), and having defense primary and melee secondary for power order; they'd keep Punchvoke and lose Gauntlet so that there's a use to taking Taunt, and Bruising would go away since damage would be handled with Fury.

Stalkers and Scrappers would be rolled up also with the Scrapper powersets, hit point cap and damage modifiers, Stalker base hit points and team critical chance (with no radius limiting the range), and "hidden criticals" would come from a secondary pick of Hide like they do for VEATs - so a respec or just a dual build can "change your AT". Hide would simply be a 10th power in the secondary available at level 1, so you can pick which power to trade away for it or take all 10 and lose a pool power. Assassin's Strike as a power wouldn't exist - it would be rolled into Hide and would increase the critical damage of your single target attacks while the toggle is active.

I'd also combine Corruptors and Defenders as a buff/debuff primary, ranged secondary AT by using the higher of the two AT modifiers across the board and using both the endurance discount portion of Vigilance and Scourge for the inherent. If you want a ranged primary, play a Blaster.

Obviously this isn't going to happen because the game isn't in the design stage and all-new ATs were created for CoV instead of old ones revisited and then MMs created for the single "new" AT.

Did you read the second sentence in the post you quoted? I specifically asked this powers team about it after the proposed changes were listed. That indicates to me that they have no intention of doing it and that it's off the table.

With Stalkers, I tab through and find something that needs to die right away and make it a priority. I then pick the next priority when it drops. Sometimes it's a minion, sometimes it's a boss. Sometimes the team is running smoothly and it's "whatever the reticle lands on first", but even then I usually try to pick up something that can cause issues if left unchecked.

Do you see how this is different from "wade through minions until the boss", "keep the bosses attention while splashing AoE on the minions", or "point to a corner where the bodies end up"? But you can play the same way (ie, fast and strategic elimination of trouble targets) for ANY of the melee ATs; that's not a Stalker thing.

You mention tools for distraction... uhm, with the exception of Ninjitsu and Demoralize, the other melee ATs get the same tools and often more - they share secondaries after all. Want to keep an entire spawn unable to act? A Stone Melee/Dark Armor Brute is going to handle that job a little better than a Stalker will.


Except that Placate sucks offensively unless you use it with Assassin's Strike. There aren't many powers that it helps, and you can trim out all of the Assassin's Strike powers after i22. So basically the bolded part above? Yeah, not really seeing it as helping.

Or overestimated their players - case in point: AE.

They acted genuinely surprised that people were trying to use it to farm as fast as possible, if Posi's rather (in)famous blowup post is any indication.

But I don't know that they see the system itself as something they regret as much as how everything fell down around it.

Well, I figured you got your answer already in the first few posts. After that it was just trying to clear up any potentially generated confusion based on posts containing factually incorrect information presented in a manner that was clearly trying to describe it as factual.

That's not going to happen. It's part of the design of the power and will not be changing.

Yes, I specifically asked about this.

The way it has been described to us, Assassin's Focus only burns off from Assassin's Strike (each time it's used) and builds on any and every attack other than AS. That's plenty of control - more than you get with Scourge, and since you don't lose any of the criticals you have now for it, it can only have a positive effect on your DPS in that manner.

Close.

It's 0.75 points/second all the time.

There's an additional 1.25 points/second decay that suppresses when you're attacked, so 5 seconds after the last mob attacks you, you're back to the original 2 points (4% +dam)/sec decay rate.

True, but Dwarf form is.

I was going to make a snarky comment, but couldn't figure out a good way to word it without being far more insulting than the joke it would've been intended to be.

Suffice it to say that I do not agree that this is the reason.

I'm also amused at the fact that when I checked a couple of things Dominator Ice Storm also has Containment damage (it summons the exact same pet as the Controller version). Which wasn't included. Oops?

What I was checking was whether or not it did full damage on Containment (it doesn't), which means that the 794.1 should be as follows:
(0.78 lethal + 0.78 cold + 0.78 cold-containment) * 75 ticks, or 175.5 "base" damage with containment; at the damage cap for Controllers (400%) that's 702 damage, not 794.1.

For a Dominator it would be the 175.5 "base" damage * (1 + 0.95 slotting + 0.68 embrace of fire) to get to 461.565; with Sleet's -res you multiply that by 1.3 for a total of 600.0345; that's a lot closer than the 499.8 difference in the numbers provided.

I don't feel like figuring out the damage for Creepers because it's an AoE that generates another AoE and so the actual damage dealt fluctuates wildly, but suffice it to say that the difference in damage there will also be much smaller.


Edit: ignoring Creepers (which will slightly benefit the Controller) I came up to 1705.36 for the Controller at the damage cap with Containment using the powers listed, and 1948.96 for the Dominator using Sleet - and that's without counting the Containment damage in the Dominator's Ice Storm. Strange how ignoring slotting a much higher damage modifier and large resistance debuff works out to skew the numbers.

And Blasters, depending on their APP choice.

Talk about skewed results... you damage cap the Controller via Fulcrum Shift and then add in freebie Containment that they don't have to use animation time to set up, and then don't even include the enhancements on the Dominator which would raise their damage by more than just Fiery Embrace, let alone the extra powers that they have available.

I can see why you feel that Controllers are outdamaging Dominators. You skew the math so far in their favor that they're doing more "base damage" than any other AT that exists.

Edit to add: I also noticed that you have Ice Storm but neglected Sleet. Seriously, were you just deliberately trying to make Dominators seem so much weaker? Those numbers are worse than meaningless, they're completely misleading.

So what you're saying is that next you'll be shooting cannons off into neighboring houses?

Yeah, the increased mez resistance cap (to 10,000%) came in issue 13 - previously it was 100% or half duration. That's a couple of issues after Willpower.

The set that has both mez protection and mez resistance is Widow Teamwork with Indomitable Will (protection) and Foresight (25% mez resistance).

I'd go so far as to change that to "in almost every non-outlier case", but I'm sure someone would then argue because there's no clear definition of what an outlier for each AT entails.