UberGuy

Except that example assumes the situations are symmetric, and the point is that they are not. If everyone loves the new items, then losing the old items is a non-issue. But if that assumption turns out false, then for folks opposed to Option 1 there's the risk of losing something that potentially cannot be regained.

I'm sorry, where did "never use" something actually enter into the picture?

Can you point out the design document that states that? Moreover, can you point out the dev statement backing the idea that we should never expect to be able to do that in general?

Obviously I don't think you can do any of those things. The above is your opinion. You don't speak for the devs; you're stating you you think things should be based on what you do. Thereby, you're trying to enforce how you play the game on other people, without regard for their own preferences.

Let's call things like they are - everyone here is looking out for their own interests. The problem is, as I pointed out above, that the results of the different options here have asymmetric outcomes. When it comes to how their characters look, pro-Option 1 people are guaranteed to [edit]to not lose anything from[/edit] their own costumes with any of Option 1, 2 or 3, while the anti-Option 1 people risk undesirable (to them) costume changes with Option 1.

I really would not like that. If a new and old piece really don't look the same, and I use the piece in a way that looks fine in the old view and bad in the new, I don't want a costume that looks bad to other people just because it looks OK to me.

For some of us, costume appearance is a core aspect of our characters. I have characters who've existed since the first few weeks this game existed (been playing since CoH pre-release). Certainly those characters costumes have changed since I created them, but I eventually settled on a core appearance that's central to my concept for them, and some of the pieces (and faces) I've used are very old. Once I find an appearance I really liked, I generally do not change it. I may have other costumes for the characters, but there's always one stable "main" costume I intend to be theirs.

Sure, some new pieces may come along, and I may decide that, "damn, that's so much more what I really wanted them to look like all along," and if so, then I'd change them. But that's not what's being discussed here. What's being discussed is taking legacy pieces and updating them, and there's simply no guarantee that those updates will leave my "core" costumes looking like they do now, or more specifically, that those updates will leave my "core" costumes looking good.

Saying it's just a choice between old, ugly pieces and new better ones is a false dichotomy. As a group, we have no idea what updated pieces might end up interacting with how some of us have used the legacy ones. Changing them (rather than adding updated versions) is risking that pieces we think work very well right now might not look right (or deliver the same impressions, which is important) tomorrow.

If you can't understand that, I really don't know how to explain it better.

I would prefer you spend the time to make the system more flexible than spend the time revisiting legacy pieces. If you spend time now on the menu work, you reduce the either/or requirement for Options 1 and 2 later.

Could you link me to that? I don't remember saying that.

Given that 5-6% improvements in recharge aren't likely to translate into 5-6% increases for metrics like DPS or survival time, and that the 5-6% increases don't even apply across all powers (the improvement tends to be lower for powers with lower recharge-to-activation time ratios), no, I don't see a big deal.

Edit: To be clear, I know we can get things besides this kind of +recharge. I started rebutting the recharge as a specific case of something you claimed was likely to be transformative even on high-end builds, which I do not accept. Of course you are now explaining this line of thinking further, as shown here...

(1) I never said we weren't gaining anything. I'm calling BS on the claim that the thing we're gaining in general is more than a few percent improvement in the total attributes (calculated as 1-old/new) of most previously highly optimized builds, with specific exception made for cases where high-but-not-capped defense can add more defense.

(2) Stop speaking in the abstract. Give me a concrete example. Show me a build. Illustrate how the example is applicable across a wide range of powersets and builds, and isn't an edge case. Be prepared to defend the example against the argument that the "before" build is poorly optimized.

If you aren't willing to do (2) above, then you need to be quiet.

Again, I want a concrete before/after build example. I am asking for this because highly optimized builds don't slot things with 18 extra slots to gain 15% recharge. If this is your idea of min/maxing something I cannot wait to see builds you might post.

(1) Based on your example above, I'm starting to think you think it's a red herring because you aren't very good at this whole min/max thing. Come on, take the opportunity and prove me wrong.
(2) It's spelled "Chewbacca"

Um, what? Are we even having the same argument?

OK, so let's be clear. We can agree this change is an unqualified boon to all the people who have perma Hasten. Have you looked at how many builds that is? I mean, wow. You would have done better to home in on my exception for high defense - more builds are going to be effected by that.

Oh yeah, all those highly min/maxed builds that slotted 5 Red Fortunes... Wait, what?

This is UberGuy waiting for you to post a real build. This is UberGuy finding it really hard to understand how those examples you gave of "before" builds are (a) representative of strong min/maxing or (b) representative of enough existing min/maxed builds to represent a broad shift in power at the top end of existing performance. I have been qualifying my claims with words like "most", because I do recognize that there are almost certainly build outliers I didn't think of, but I don't believe they're going to be common enough to represent a general issue.

What I'm asking you to show is an example of a well optimized build that you then dramatically improve performance of. If you can it'd be awesome if you showed the qualitative improvement on something like DPS, average time-to-defeat (or average immortality line), Mez mag/sec stacking potential or something like that. If you can't or won't, just post the builds and let someone else do it for you. The best example would be something that you think a lot of builds could replicate because it uses [edit]commonly-used[/edit] sets, commonly-used pool powers, etc.

Just as an FYI if you haven't seen it, last I saw in the Scrapper forum it looks like BillZ wasn't sure he's going to see the DPS increase he last presented in this thread because it's not clear how Follow Up stacking works out at his top-end recharge. Until that's cleared up, we probably shouldn't use it as an example.

This may be a valid concern, or it may not. After all, we only have those examples of wide-scale re-balancing to tell us what might cause a wide-scale re-balancing.

On the flip side, this is a completely different set of conditions, by which I mean the devs are now two different lead designers removed from those days, and the powers lead in particular is a different guy who came in rather after those decisions were made. In some ways, the entire philosophy the devs take can be said to have changed; Statesman was of the opinion that unhappy people would be replaced by standard MMO "churn" while Positron said he was more interested in retaining what had proven to be an unusually stable playerbase.

So sure, they might give us an ED/GDN. Or, they might revamp more narrow things, like just +defense (elusivity?) or just purples (probably not likely, but it's an example), or something like that.

I can tell you, I really don't expect them to address buff stacking. Even ED was a tweak within the existing system. The implications of changing buff stacking seem pretty far reaching - I think the devs would have a lot of work to do to make that happen, because I believe that doing it right would take much more than just a change in the buff calculations. Every stackable buff and debuff would conceivably have to be reviewed, including those from NPCs. I can only offer guesses and theories here, but my guess is that doing this well, reviewing and balancing it would take enough man hours away from other production that it's probably better just rolled into a new version of the game. (That doesn't even touch on the uproar it would cause, because I think it would be a bigger impact to how characters play than ED and the GDN were put together.)

It's a tangent, but I want to point out that the CoP is only hard in two respects.

(1) It takes multiple teams of people to coordinate their actions. We're talking really simple levels of coordination, to be honest, but people on the same teams are rarely required to coordinate in this game. If you get even just the team leaders on Skype or Ventrillo or something, the coordination gets a ton easier.
(2) The aspect of Rularuu is an exercise in raw effective DPS. If you have enough, you will take him down in one pass.

So if you are coordinated and bring a truckload of effective DPS, you can blow through the trial in like 10 minutes. If you are uncoordinated and/or don't bring enough DPS, or bring too much of it as melee DPS without enough +toHit to overcome Hurricane, you might never finish it.

It's wildly binary. Honestly, if you're coordinated and know what to do, it's probably easier than the RSF.

(Someone really good at this debate stuff would do the math themselves and then prove my assertions wrong - if indeed my assertions were wrong.)

To recap the conditions under debate:

Hasten with 98% recharge slotting (your number) and 60% global recharge has a cycle time of 141.9 seconds. During one cycle of Hasten, our 650s recharge power, 3-slotted for recharge (which I called 95% recharge) would earn 445.8 seconds worth of recharge time, meaning it would, on average, take it 650/445.8 = 1.46 Hasten cycles to recharge. That's 206.9s.

Now let's add in your 15% global recharge. Now Hasten's cycle time is 134.1s. During one cycle of Hasten, the 650s recharge power with 95% slotted recharge earns 446.1s of recharge time. That means it takes 650/446.1 Hasten cycles to recharge, which still works out to 1.46 cycles, which is now 195.4 seconds.

195.4/206.9 = 94%, or a 6% reduction.

I seem to recall saying...

Maybe it's a good thing you didn't go through the effort of the math yourself after all.

And yet if you kept those thee slots in Hasten, you would improve its uptime. I have never known anyone who had anything less than perma-Hasten to remove slots from Hasten when they got more global recharge.

I know plenty people who build "min/max" versions of both of those (more Rads Emishes than MM Blasters) and none have built either without Fitness. Of course those builds were optimized for DPS and -regen - those with other goals might be able to optimize differently.

Having added PP and more than +5% end some of my own characters, I'm going to say I'm not sure that'll be as transformative as you think it is, because while I noticed the difference in my own characters, I didn't find it dramatic. I will however, concede that being able to add Body/Energy Mastery to a build that didn't have them is going to be one of the nicer improvements the Fitness move will allow. As I said, I've added that pool to characters already, and I still wouldn't consider it a dramatic change in performance, but that's getting into subjective arguments. Focusing just on the +regen part, I'd say take a look at difference in the actual number of HP/sec regen you're earning between builds. If it's around 3 HP/sec or less, I don't consider that a major performance change; I couldn't "feel" the difference in play.

All my melees actually have Fighting, and all my Defenders/Corruptors/Controllers already have Leadership. I think the potential weirdness gets into play when they all have both. (I already have a Scrapper with both today, and it's a Regen who didn't take Fitness.)

I'm definitely not trying to say it's not a buff. I just think there's a lot of hyperbole about how big a buff it is for most people, and that some people are defending that hyperbole by pointing out two examples.

1) Examples where people fit in more +defense into high defense builds that aren't currently soft-capped. Those are going to get a lot better for sure.
2) Examples where someone has a build that could already be a lot better, and they combine those improvements with the additional improvements this change makes possible. They then point to the combined improvements and declare how massive the improvements possible with this change are.

There are some good points being raised in this and the other discussions, but I'm specifically trying to argue against the two above. You mostly got dragged into this because your build kind of straddles both examples, and because you were one of the only people posting facts about a known good build.

Edit: By the way, if they do give us more slots, my whole position flies out the window, and I'm board with the notion that this would be big-time power shift.

No, they have just said we'll be able to slot the powers, and have made no suggestions that anything else (like number of slots) is changing as a result.

And here we get into classic Another_Fan argument territory. Compared to most regular posters around this forum I am a lightweight at breaking out math to back up a point, and you can't even be bothered to make a quantitative argument with me.

So can you give us an example build that's "maxed out" without Fitness? It'd be a big bonus if they aren't non-Stalker Willpower or Regen.

And you feel that Brute is "maxed out" without Fitness now?

No, it's not. I'm sorry, but I disagree with you. It's not "making it happen". It's a huge increase in your DPS, and you don't want to do it now because of (a) you can't have the Incarnate slot with it, which isn't part of this at all, and (b) you don't have or want to get the cash on hand to make the change.

Of the two, (b) is the most relevant. Getting Maneuvers in I9 is a hell of a lot easier for you than getting a +3% unique right now, but if you really cared enough about this leap in performance, you'd do it. It's an option. While losing an LotG would likely further impact your final DPS, your net increase would still be large.just

"Making easier" is not "making possible", no matter how hard you argue the point. If you wanted this bad enough you could have the majority of it, period. What's possible tomorrow compared to what's possible today is much less of a transformative change than what's you have today compared to what's possible tomorrow.

And the sacrifice is the real delta here, not just the final delta in your DPS now vs your DPS later.

That's about what I was thinking. Will you actually have a full SO's worth of end reduction in Maneuvers? It sounds like you have an LotG in there now.

Sounds likely.

OK, so you could have this build today barring the Incarnate slot, without the Fitness change to an inherent.

That means that the Fitness change isn't introducing the potential for a DPS leap for your character. It's making it easier, no doubt, but it's not creating a situation that doesn't already exist.

It looks to me like it's giving you an alternative (and to you, more attractive/achievable) route to something you could already be doing.

You might want to look at that carefully. I don't think PP adds up to enough EPS for that without good slot investment in either it or those powers.

Post the builds.

Also, I already shot down this notion that +15% recharge is likely to be a transformative addition to a character with far lower global recharge than what you're quoting. +15% recharge on top of 160% is an incremental improvement in the character.

Is your "extra damage when you need it" Assault? How much extra damage is it? What's it do to your DPS, quantitatively?

It is absolutely valid. If one of the pools makes that much difference then you should have it today. Especially if it makes that much difference if it or one of the pools you would keep adds enough value to justify them with minimal slotting.

Define "couldn't fit in a patron pool". Again, if it's going to turn you into that much of a monster, I think you would have done it already. Stop hand waving and back up your claims with hard evidence. So far, Bill's the only one doing so.

Can you replace Combat Jumping with a Gladiator's Armor +3% unique and take Hasten today?

I know that. But so what? We know it's going to trivialize existing content if it's going to be needed for harder content - it has to. Lumping it in here (which you've now clarified) muddies the waters on what this change does.

Well, you gave the example of things like DE, and I find the whole damn mission to be a rough patch as far as them laying Quartz. Every spawn doesn't get one, but it sure seems like most do.

It's a bit of an aside, but I can tell you that currently I can't get Unstoppable's end crash to go away with Conserve power. I mean I can get back in the fight plenty fast, but it seems to consistently drop my toggles. I'm not saying it's going to be a big slow down, but I do think you'll want to time the crash outside of combat.

I don't consider including the +Recharge Alpha slot to be part of this change. Unless I misread your posts, the delta without it is much smaller.

Edit: I'd also like to point out that you speak of Elude as though you could perma it. Not including the Alpha slot, what's the average recharge your build is looking at? To get Elude to 2/3 uptime (180s on, 90s off) I'm getting that you'd need about +170% global.

Edit2: The reason I want to exclude the alpha slot is that it's probably supposed to create a break in your character's power relative to existing PvE almost by definition. It's the kickoff down a road to new, supposedly (much?) harder PvE foes.

You might want to go back and try re-reading what I said.

I said all the low-hanging fruit that would transform a character's performance was already picked on a "maxed out build". If it hasn't been picked already, it's very unlikely (but not impossible) that the character is currently "maxed out".

If something is going to absolutely transform how your character plays, and you're a min/maxer, you damn well find a way to fit it in. Yes, that usually means you make a sacrifice somewhere else - you sacrifice things that are less transformative. A good min/maxer drops the thing that will have the least impact on the character through the loss.

Yes, this change means that some of those things min/maxers couldn't fit in will now come back into the builds, though probably with limited slotting. By the description above, those things will not be transformative or they would not have been dropped in the first place.

I have consistently made exception for people with high but not softcapped defense who can now fit in more defense, because small incremental changes in high defense can become transformative changes in survival.

I am not declaring that builds will not improve. My builds will improve. I am saying that the peak achievable performance will improve, but not by by a whole lot. BillZ's examples are, in fact, concrete evidence of this. Yes, his builds are improving. No, they are not improving by leaps and bounds.