SpittingTrashcan

I have this proc in Stamina on several characters, and periodically get messages in the combat log saying that it fired and gave me endurance. So, yes, it works.

Actually, no. Set bonuses seem to have affected the envy that each of the specialist ATs have for the other two, and all of them have for the generalists, not one bit in either direction.

Indeed, when playing Guild Wars, I hop between US and EU instances of the hub towns all the time. There's even a drop-down menu to do it - of course, GW has a rather different mapping between servers, instances, and characters than CoH.

There are any number of possible schemes for allocating powers and rewards to custom enemies that would be preferable to the one we now have. The developers are probably considering several already, but it doesn't hurt to suggest more. Powers unlocking by level would seem to be at least roughly comparable to the evolution of existing enemy groups, which tend to have more and more powerful attacks depending on their level band (and vice versa). Compared to existing enemy groups, custom enemies tend to be unusually well-supplied with powers - many have at least as many attacks as a Bone Daddy or Damned, who are fearsome opponents at the level you encounter them simply because they have an attack chain.

So, yes, I agree that there's a problem, and so do the devs, apparently. But it's probably going to be a fair amount of time and a lot of work behind the scenes before we see a better solution.

Actually, it's still quite clear-cut; the math is just more complex.

With a short character, from the rear? Yes, unfortunately.

Isn't an outlier, by definition, a narrow road to a performance peak? Hammering down outliers creates a broad, flat performance band that doesn't privilege one particular choice above others.

Let me be clear that I don't have any objection to optimizing play, and I don't have a problem with performance disparities created by intelligent choices. What I do think is unhealthy is when certain choices lock you completely out of certain bands of performance, no matter what choices you make from then on, especially if those choices are irrevocable and frequently made in a state of ignorance as to their consequences. Since the alternative to this basically amounts to "you should have read the forums before you rolled your first character" and/or "you should never roll this combo, even if you like the sets, because it will always suck", I don't think it's an unreasonable line to draw.

(I also note that this line does not translate to "everybody should be able to solo at +4/x8 or nobody should". What it does mean is that any AT/set combo should have some route into a high performance band, whether that be via soloing, teams, or some other context. There are several ways in which this goal is arguably undermined - a few that spring immediately to mind are the supremacy of AoE over ST, the ongoing issues with offense/defense/assist specialist ATs who may or may not be overpaying for their specialties, the design of the Mastermind AT as a complete team in miniature, etcetera.)

Mmhm.
You would think that, yes.

I think that the new difficulty options are throwing certain enormous performance disparities from a relatively small number of builds into sharp relief. I think that calling for across-the-board buffs so that everybody performs on the level of a few outliers is not likely to get you the result you intend, for exactly the reasons Aett laid out.

And as mentioned above, I think that if the devs had it to do all over again, they never would have built the defense/resistance model around additive scaling toward an exponentially increasing benefit. I think that they continually weigh the costs and benefits of revisiting that early decision.

There you go. Mids calculates in the crit chance as a boost to the base values, a decision which I somewhat regret as it has tripped up people time and time again. CoD does not.

As for the rest of your argument, you've glossed over some pretty important points. Yes, CI looks poor when compared to Jacob's Ladder and Thunderstrike, but this has less to do with CI and more to do with the fact that Jacob's Ladder and Thunderstrike get their AoE damage component for free. Their DPE (when using the base values, not Mids' inflated numbers) is 0.192, the standard for single target attacks. Whether CI is overpaying for its multitarget potential or not, JL and TS are strongly underpaying for theirs.

CI, JL and TS also pay nothing extra for their end drain, the secondary effect that all Elec powers share, and TS pays nothing extra for its KD and stun effects. But that is all immaterial in any case, as melee attack costs have never been balanced for secondary effects - perhaps an unwise decision, but one the current devs have chosen not to revisit - and, in fact, in at least two cases (Siphon Life and Clobber) they have chosen to increase the damage on a power despite the fact that it originally had a greatly reduced damage due to its useful secondary effect.

I glossed over your comparison in the prior post out of mercy. Calculating the DPA of CI by adding the jump times to the activation time of CI is extremely misleading. The reason DPA is important is because animation times are important: while you are animating one power, you cannot activate another, and in a fully populated attack chain, that becomes the major limiting factor on your DPS. But you can activate another attack while CI is still arcing, so the arcs improve your damage output over time rather than reduce it as you would indicate. If all of the arcs fire, you end up dealing your 4.05 damage for an animation cost to you of 1 second: a DPA of 4.05, better than a target-capped TS!

A subtler error is your consistent assumption that other multi-target powers can hit their target cap as easily as CI can. In particular, it is rare to pack ten ordinary-sized enemies into the eight foot radius of Whirling Sword, to say nothing of getting five enemies into the 7 foot cone of Slice. By contrast, each of the arcs in CI can strike any enemy in a 10 foot sphere around the target of the last arc. As an opening gambit against a reasonably sized spawn, CI has a high probability of arcing its full possible number of jumps.

So, let's look at your proposal: each arc does the full damage of the original strike (1.32 DS, since we're not adding in the crit chance), and the cost of the power is 8.53 End, giving it a break-even multiplier of 1.24. Let's look at that DPE/DPA calculation again, without pretending that we can't do anything while CI is arcing:

(1.32 * 5) / 8.53 = 0.77 DPE
(1.32 * 5) / 1 = 6.6 DPA

Yeah, um, that's almost as good as target-capped Foot Stomp (0.77 DPE/6.76 DPA), on a 14 second recharge. Would I like it? Absolutely! But I think it's best to be clear and accurate about precisely how much candy you're asking for. The end cost reduction is about in line with what I would consider reasonable (remember when I said 1.25x for break-even?), but the damage increase is a little bit much.

A more reasonable request, IMO, would be to keep the end cost and arc damage the same, reduce the recharge to 12 seconds, and increase the first-target damage to about 1.55, so that the additional cost for the four extra damage ticks is only 2 seconds of recharge and 1.25x end cost compared to a ST attack of the same damage. But that's just balancing CI against other single attacks from other sets, discounting that it's in a set that also gets JL, TS, and of course Lightning Frickin' Rod.

I think the idea is less that Weave as it is now would be more attractive if the softcap was unreachable, and more that in the absence of builds that reach the softcap, Weave could be buffed to provide more defense so as to make it useful for people who don't already have lots of defense.

This line consistently builds upward my blood pressure. It is a foolish and unrealistic idea.

Crane Kick: 2.06 DS, 10s rech, 10.2 end
Siphon Life: 2.06 DS, 10s rech, 10.2 end

Really now. As I said, I wouldn't mind an improvement to CI, but you must work a little harder on your arguments.

If this is finally implemented, after I've only been saying it should have been this way from the start to anyone who would listen for three bloody issues now, I'm going to dance the I Told You So dance for days.

Ahem.

/signed

Edited to add: And this would have been a much better way to implement Dev's Choice, too. We all know the devs' names, we can look up their recommendations our own selves like grown up people.

I think you mean the other one.

... Oh, right. Damage aura.

The trick is keeping that aura saturated with targets, and that comes back to what is meant by "best". Spines wins on AoE DPS over long enough periods, but it's not tops on burst IIRC. And if you're being tailed by a Kin, FS'd Foot Stomp kills everything before the aura has even started cooking. So, yeah. OP needs to be more specific, IMO.

Elec is just the wrong answer, though. And Elec Stalker is really wrong, unless we're talking maximum possible solo burst AoE. In which case, BU Lightning Rod is damned impressive - but BU AAO Lightning Rod is better. Not to say that Elec Stalkers aren't good fun, especially as LR does not break Hidden status. Just... not the answer for AoE damage in the general case.

It would be ridiculous of me to assert that AE was the only way to PL, or that PL has died with AE farms. It would be ridiculous and hypocritical of me to assert that farming or PLing is always evil, as I have from time to time done both. What I am asserting is that PI is just a bit more inaccessible to new players than AE was; that it is not the most immediately obvious path forward, the way AE was; and that therefore, it does not attract a large number of players who then never experience any other part of the game, the way AE did. I won't pretend that leveling by passing from zone to zone and taking missions appropriate to your level, teamed with other characters of level near yours, is the only way to enjoy the game. But I do think that it's a path that most new players will benefit from. Facing diverse challenges, learning how to use all your powers to overcome them, learning how you fit into teams where you have to contribute toward the team's success - these produce more skilled players.

And if you feel you've learned all you can from the regular game, and have grown tired of "the grind"... PI will still be there. In my opinion, if the only AE building heroside were in Portal Court, and the only AE building villainside were in the middle of the Fab, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

But, of course, all of this is my opinion, and I am nobody of note.