UberGuy

This doesn't matter. I don't know why you're so fixated on this.

Saying the cap is +300% is exactly the same as saying the damage total cap is 400%.

It doesn't matter. Repeat after me. The distinction you are making does not matter.

It has nothing to do with how enhancements fit into the calculation.

This is a preposterous conclusion. People who don't care about doing complex math can do just fine by using approximations. Seriously, do you think many people who don't want to do complex math even bother to show the attribute monitor. For those that do, the information it displays is meaningful enough most of the time, and that's almost certainly why it displays what it does the way it does.

As Hopeling says, the monitor has no way to know what power it should display the total for. My example Defender is not realistic in the sense that many characters do not have the same level of damage slotting in every power. Even min/max builders will sometimes let post-ED damage be around 90%, instead of 95%. If you slot purples or superior ATEs, it's easy to drive even post-ED damage to 100% and change. And every power in the same character can be slightly different.

Except that's not valid if, for example, you're a Brute who doesn't slot ~100% damage. It's also not valid if you are slotting low-level enhancements (such as DOs) or if you have a power that deals damage but that you wanted to slot for something else. (Think many Controller holds.)

That's why the monitor only displays the global buffs. It really is a messy affair. There's no generalized way to display it as a single number.

Yes, the display value is the bonus, so the total is 100% plus the bonus. However, you originally said...

The orange part is not correct. That should not be added. The cap is 400%, not 500%.

It is correctly displaying the buff hard cap. What it is not showing accurately is how close you are to that cap with each power. You may already be at the cap, but the display will suggest you have more room before you reach it.

Certainly it can be argued that the monitor's label is somewhat inaccurate and/or that the cap display is misleading. However, the monitor has no useful way to show how each power you have is affected by its damage enhancement. So all the monitor shows is globally applicable damage buffs. Basically, when the damage monitor turns blue, what it is telling is that you'd be capped now if you had no damage enhancement at all.

As an aside, while it might seem that the part of Musculature that bypasses ED is globally applicable and so should show up in the damage buff monitor, this isn't the case. Alpha Slot powers only enhance the damage of powers that can actually take the enhancements the Alpha slot offers. Global damage bonuses can enhance the damage of powers even if those powers don't take damage enhancements, but Musculature will not boost them. For an obscure example, Stone Melee/Fault usually does no damage, and doesn't take damage enhancements. However, if you use Fiery Aura/Fiery Embrace first, Fault does do damage. Musculature will not increase this extra damage Fault does under these conditions, but damage bonuses such as Fury or Build Up will.

Test away. You'll find that enhancements do count.

I'm not sure if this is what you're saying, but bypassing ED has nothing to do with bypassing the damage buff cap. All having additional +damage from Musculature does is reduce the headroom you have before you reach the buff cap.

Let me give a specific example. Let's take a Defender who has ED "max" damage slotting in each attack, so that they have +95% damage enhancement after ED takes its toll. Let's say they're solo, so Vigilance gives them another +30% buff. They also run Assault, which is +18.75% damage for Defenders, and +12% damage buffs from IO sets. That adds up to +155.75% damage.

The Defender damage buff cap is +300%. That means our Defender has room for 300% - 155.75% = +144.25% damage on every attack before they reach the cap. This leaves room for benefit from things like red inspirations, Aim, etc.

Now let's give our Defender Musculature Core Paragon, which is +45% damage enhancement in all attacks, 30% of which ignores ED. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to verify that if you start out around +95% damage slotting after ED, Musculature Core Paragon will put you at about +127.5%. So now our Defender's attacks all deal +188.25% damage, leaving them +111.75% more to go before they hit the buff cap. The +30% from Musculature that ignores ED still has to honor the +300% buff cap.

This stuff is pretty easy to test. You should be able to look at an attack's enhancement value in the in-game enhancement screen (and any persistent +damage buffs like set bonuses in the attribute monitor). Then go damage something, and back out the enhancement+buffs value to arrive at a base damage value. Then you can start popping red inspirations and see where your damage stops going up. Then calculate what ratio of your base damage that capped damage is.

It's recommended that you test with a character that's over level 20, since most AT's damage buff cap is reduced below level 21. Also, be sure not to apply any damage resistance debuffs to the target, as you would have to factor those out. This test would not be easy to perform with Sonic Attack, or anyone with a -DR proc slotted, for example.

This is incorrect.

They do. This is very well-tested knowledge.

The cap for players depends on archetype. You can find the damage buff caps on the Limits Page of Paragon Wiki. The values there are correct - the only remotely recent change here is the reduction of the Brute value in Issue 19.

MM pets have three "archetypes", one for each rank of pet. There's another common "archetype" used for most other pets, like Phantasm or Dark Servant. As far as I know, the damage buff cap for all those ATs is +300%, or 400% total.

You aren't barred from going on the trial without that slot filled. You're barred based on whether it's unlocked. Slotting doesn't provide access. Unlocking does.

I understand all of that. The "huh?" was because stating that doesn't have anything to do with the question at hand.

It seems highly unlikely you don't already know this, but just in case, Alpha does enhance Incarnate powers in general. Musculature enhances Judgement and Lore. Vigor enhances Rebirth (and Lore pets with heals). More directly relevant to my post, Cardiac enhances the DR of Barrier.

Vigor enhances the +regen aspects of Melee Core Hybrid (well, at least of the toggle part), but Cardiac does not enhance the DR aspects, at least not of the T3 and T4 powers. That inconsistency seems very odd.

Yeppers.

The immobilize and terrorize are mag 2. The stun is mag 5. All last 10 seconds.

My Dark Dark Defender is offended by the very notion of that idea, and would never take a power that worked that way, should one come along.

Also, my name is Harcourt Fenton Mudd.

Except that it's not, at least not consistently. Worse, there's no benefit in having the best ranged damage if there's not a sufficiently high benefit to being at range, and it can be argued that the need to chase down foes is worth being able to stand in the middle of the aggro cap's worth of them and not die.

Well, in the case of melee characters, they rarely need that capability, since they rarely get mezzed. And for the rest of them, they have other things that either help them avoid being mezzed or help them survive long enough for mezzes to wear off. If the Blaster can't get the foe defeated while mezzed, it's Break Free or bust.

Ultimately the point is not that Blasters are unplayable. It's that everything else is significantly easier to play (or, said another way, can more readily turn up its difficulty), and or has much higher plateaus to which it can be built, with some notable exceptions such as */Mental. The discussion is about closing those gaps.

I don't think there's any compelling reason to avoid homogenization of capability. Scrappers and Controllers can both be amazingly survivable, but they go about it very, very differently. I'm quite certain that almost no one (and certainly not Arcanaville) is proposing giving Blasters armor secondaries. But they could still, in theory, be made a lot more survivable, a little more damaging, and not really that much more like the other ATs than they already are.

By and large, unless it's driven by some external (non-balance) cause, the devs don't go look at sets and introduce changes just for giggles. When the hammer animation time changes came in (which was an example of such an externally-driven change), Stone went from "fairly amazing" to "pretty decent" single-target damage. The devs aren't compelled to start making changes to sets that are "pretty decent".

And while Stone Melee's AoE damage potential has always been poor, to put it kindly, I don't expect the devs to be particularly sympathetic to complaints about lack of strong damage AoE in sets. For all that the playerbase sometimes seems fixated on AoE damage dealing, given the (lack of) balance around it in this game, trying to address it across powersets like that risks being a can of worms on par with Pandora's box.

Wouldn't that demand some sort of songbird attack power? Like, Swarm of Robins or something? Optionally, you could sing a high note and cause them to explode on enemies.

Honestly, given that Stone Melee is a powerset from the original release, and given the history of the original devs, I find that chain of thought very unlikely. The original devs gave no consideration whatsoever to the concept of DPA - animation/activation time simply never entered their thinking as a balance tool.

If you look at the damage-per-cast and ignore animation time, Tremor has more-or-less comparable damage to lots of other melee PBAoEs in the original powersets, such as Whirling Hands and Whirling Axe. The real problem is in its long activation time. Given the above perspective on the original devs' views on activation times, I think this is down to their lack of awareness of the impact this has, rather than any intentional design.

Yes. Doublehit damage is proportional to power cycle time (presently with no enhancement). The lower the cycle time of your power, the less damage it will do (in addition to being less likely to activate).

For powersets dominated by fast cycling powers, Core is likely the better choice.

I'm not sure I understand this comment.

I have seamless attack chain of SK,CS,SK,KaK into which I insert AS when it's ready, where "ready" means reacharged and that I have 2-3 stacks of Assassin's focus.

Are you trying to build a chain which introduces AS into every cycle unconditionally?

Which has nothing at all to do with the suggestion. If we used that criteria for making or accepting the validity of suggestions we would invalidate nearly all of them.

When you are changing powers frequently, that becomes obnoxious. That's why I am suggesting a change. I've mentioned this solution/workaround in my explanation. I do not find it satisfactory, or I wouldn't have posted the suggestion. Frequently manipulating power choices in our trays is more onerous than it could be - we do it because there is no alternative. I am proposing one such alternative