UberGuy

I also hope for this. I don't know if they'll be able to pull it off, since it will require some sort of user interface change, and those seem to be among the hardest changes to get done to the game. But I do agree with you that it's very important. The math for this isn't trivial by most people's standards, and making the effect also mostly inscrutable is just not cool at all.

Even Mids doesn't (yet) have a place to clearly display how this works, let alone the actual game.

Expanding on what Hopeling described, the server can't react to the fact that our attack has finished activating any faster than the "ticks" of the server-side timer that processes everything going on in our shard. (There may be more than one timer handling things, but there is definitely just one responsible for processing our attacks.)

That means that all our attack activation times are rounded up to the next largest number of server ticks the activation time fits into.

FYI, current versions of Mids allow you to set whether your displayed activation times include adjustments for this effect. That's great if you are working on optimal attack chains (since it affects how fast you can actually fire the next attack in the chain), but it has nothing to do with the way PPM procs calculate cycle times. PPM always uses the base, unadjusted activation time (plus recharge time).

Hm, that sucks.

Good point. The Defender and Corruptor versions are still super fast cycling (and low damage scale), but the Blaster version is not.

Sort of. Buzzsaw builds were never as good as anyone thought back when they were all the rage. Coming to an understanding of the "Arcanatime" mechanics meant they weren't as effective as we originally thought. I haven't seen folks in the min/max discussions in the various AT sub-forums talk seriously about a buzzsaw build in a really long time.

But yes, anyone who has such a build (and I know from the forums that some folks do, sometimes for concept reasons) it now won't perform as well.

There's a pretty good thread on the topic here, complete with a link to a Google docs spreadsheet that does the math. But the thread's gotten pretty fairly big, so here's a summary.

Most current 15% chance procs will become 3*1.25 = 3.75 PPM*
Most current 20% chance procs will become 4*1.25 = 5 PPM
Current 33% chance procs and SBE purple procs will probably become 4.5*1.25 = 5.625 PPM
Current ATE procs will probably become 6*1.25 = 7.5 PPM

* Some of the low-chance procs may move up a tier, as Synapse has agreed that some of them seem to have lower chances to activate than other, similar procs for no clear balance reason.

The chance a proc will activate is governed by the following formula.

Proc% = PPM * (ActivationTime + RechargeTime / (1+SlottedRecharge)) / 60

• The above quantity is capped at 90%
• Activation time is the "raw" value, not accounting for "Arcanatime"
• SlottedRecharge should only include actual enhancement and/or the ED-observing part of Alpha slots like Spiritual. Global recharge and/or the part of Alphas like Spiritual that ignores ED do not apply.

Of specific importance here is that slotting 90% recharge in fast-cycling powers with PPM procs is likely to reduce the effective proc rate compared to "flat-rate" procs. The higher the flat-rate chance and the lower the cycle time, the more likely it is that the PPM version will proc less often. An Apocalypse proc in Neutrino Bolt, for example will almost certainly proc significantly less often than one does today. Proc rates for longer-cycling powers, though, are significantly better.

They aren't, on two counts.

(1) I'm a min/maxer, and in almost every case my current non-ATE proc rates are going to improve. So they aren't unilaterally "punishing" min/maxers.
(2) They aren't trying to punish anyone. They're trying to build a system that they think works better overall. There is almost never a version of such changes that go beyond adding a number to everyone (which isn't the sort of improvement they're shooting for here) that doesn't bring up the low end and bring down the high end. That's usually the point of such changes. Min/maxers live at the high end, and so such changes usually mess with them. That's the price of being a min/maxer in a context where online play is subject to change.

While it's not an option available to all Defenders or Corruptors, any I ever solo always have powerset choices that severely reduce foes' opportunity to mez me, their opportunity to defeat me while I'm mezzed, my susceptibility to mez, or sometimes all three. Very few Blasters have such tools unless you try to count the ability to defeat foes faster. Those who do have such tools never have them at the levels of potency that are available in Corruptor secondaries or Defender primaries.

I solo all three ATs, and believe me, my Blaster got mezzed a whole lot more. So much more that I really couldn't approach the same difficulty settings with my high-level Blaster that I could with my high level Defenders and Corruptors.

Given that it has downtime, I wouldn't actually like that so much. I tend to time when I restart it based on really expecting to need the extra protection, rather than just whenever it happens to be back.

Then again, I'm someone who never puts Hasten on auto.

If you're responding to me, I posted that Diamagnetic is terible for AVs earlier in the thread. There was a spin-off discussion about always taking the DoT-ing Interfaces period, not just for AVs, and I mentioned Diagmagnetic as not completely terrible for that. Not for AVs.

Right... but all characters are not softcapped. Nor are all "softcapped" characters necessarily capped to every vector or damage type.

No, wait.

Mechanically, there are only two options for what they gave us in Hybrid - toggle or passive. That's it. We can't have the effects that Hybrid offers, like scaling mitigation on Melee or the AoE buffs from Support, without a pulsing, consistently refreshed power. The only powers that fit those bills are passives and toggles.

A passive version of Hybrid would have been way weaker, and clearly doesn't meet their "conditional use" requirement, so a toggle was the only other option.

We're not taking it into account because it's actually not important to take it into account. Taking it into account doesn't change the outcome. Please, note what I said in my previous posts - I chose my words quite carefully. More powerset combinations can solo successfully on such higher difficulties for other ATs than Blaster combinations. It isn't relevant to my point what particular powersets do and don't solo better, only how many per AT by comparison.

Here's the other part of that - it's a fair question to ask whether those powerset combinations for other ATs are actually gaining something for their reduced ability to solo. In many cases where we're talking about the "support" ATs like Defenders, Corruptors and Controllers, they have weaker soloing because they have powers that only affect allies. So they are weaker alone, but often strong force multipliers for allies. What do Blasters gain in exchange for being comparably weaker soloists?

There's no version of using higher difficulty as a microscope on general performance that cannot be restated that way. You seem to want to focus on the motives for which one would say that, and because you seem to dislike the "me too!" motive, you want to dismiss the methodology. It doesn't work like that. It just so happens that the "me too!" mindset happens to share something with a valid approach to finding and explaining what it is about Blasters that make them historically lag in actual performance and also have increasing abandonment with increasing levels.

Not everyone is saying that. Some people are, because that's a simplistic way of looking at it, and most people don't want to dig into the details. But when we examine why other ATs scale well to higher difficulties and Blasters don't, that's potentially instructive about what Blasters may be missing.

I have rarely seen such a claim from the devs on any iTrial that gave people threads unusually often, until a patch note came out.

I have seen too many people report the 10 threads reward to think it's normal. And that's happened in other trials before, and it has always eventually been followed in a patch note mentioning making it easier to avoid that.

We are. I just wanted to make sure you got that I was saying PPM/Assault Radial are dynamic, and (supposedly) use the same formulas that (usually) determine the static values used in attacks.

And it's because some of the static values actually deviate (sometimes strongly) from the formula that DoubleHit is sometimes crazy good in comparison.

I'm not sure the reward table is bugged, per-se. It seems likely that the participation threshold is too low, which seems to happen a lot to new trials. If you don't get threads, you should get the reward table, which is supposed to be weighted towards the rare end of things. (Edit: I've run it like 20 times and haven't gotten threads, but then I haven't ever gotten threads, ever.)

Oh, my goodness is this not true. It's something like the truth, but you are terribly overstating it. Controllers who can solo at that kind of difficulty include Plant/anything, Illusion/anything and most any primary with /Rad, /Dark or /Time as a secondary. The least helpful primary for soloing is probably Ice and the least helpful secondaries are probably FF and Empathy, though Empathy can be kind of powerful if it's using its buffs on a decent pet.

Here's what I think is a much more true statement. Not all Controllers, Defenders and Corruptors can solo strongly enough to run at such difficulties, based on powerset combo.

Now here's what I think is the competing Blaster statement: Almost all Blaster combos have trouble soloing at such difficulties.

I don't think it's misleading, but I think it can't relay the whole picture. But I do think it's informative if I (or anyone) can take most other ATs, find powerset combos that we can build and play such that they can make decent progress at some difficulty, but it appears harder to find a Blaster powerset that can do that.

Now, if any one player, or even a minority of players has trouble with that, it may not be particularly informative. If it looks like a lot of players have trouble with it, I think that starts to suggest something about Blasters that probably has an impact even on lower difficulties, and maybe even when teamed.

But what if it's comparatively average of what other ATs can achieve? Yes, it's extreme compared to baseline, but what if it's not that much of a stretch for many (or all) powerset combos in all the other ATs? What would that say about Blasters, in comparison?