UberGuy

It does still happen. Everything in the Dilemma Diabolique trial is either 54(+1) through 54(+3). But I'll agree it's not very common.

I make a point of slotting a Kismet on every character that can possibly find a place for it. It cuts down on the required accuracy a lot.

Do note that Controller/Dominator AoE mezzes have low base accuracy, and you may still want a lot of accuracy to consistently hit with them, especially when facing foes who are both higher-level and have +defense to your attack types.

Interestingly, while I appreciate control (and have a strong fondness for Dark Miasma for that reason), I cannot get behind powersets that have control as their primary function. I will use my support powers as much as I can to support teammates (and myself, when solo), but I want to be able to blast things, especially solo. If my control powerset can do decent damage, even if it's mostly single-target damage, I can play and enjoy it, but if it's "pure" control (meaning high control with low damage), it's not for me.

Two men enter, no plot leaves!

Don't slot it in a pet. It might go off when you cast the pet, but after that it will indeed proc on the pet. I suppose that might be OK if you plan on standing near the pet, but I think you could get better proc chances slotted in some of your own powers.

Right now it works best in powers mild-to-long base cycle times (unmodified recharge time + activation time) and lots of recharge, slotted or global. The higher the cycle time of the power, the higher the chance it will activate each time you use it.

AoEs are currently penalized pretty strongly based on their radius and arc of effect (if cones) - larger AoE area/volume means less chance of activation. On the upside, I believe the proc still checks every target you actually hit, so even though the odds are low per target, it can still activate decently so long as you regularly hit lots of targets. (This will depend on the target cap for the power, though.) No matter how many targets you hit, though, it will only heal once per power activation.

Come I24, slotted recharge will count against the proc chance, but global bonuses like Hasten will not. AoEs will also be penalized less severely for their size.

I recommend putting it in either a single-target power with a 6-12s recharge time or an AoE with a 10 target max or higher, and slotting it in your own powers rather than a pet. I have my whole set slotted in Night Fall. Gloom is also a good choice, though I couldn't do that in my build without losing other set bonuses I wanted to keep.

Products within "walled gardens", such as books or movies accessible to Kindle or Nook readers, apps installed via iPhone or Google app stores, or movies from streaming services all can be altered or removed without your consent, assuming you don't do something like root you device and disconnect it from the "garden".

Of course, Amazon or Barnes & Noble would be unlikely to need to "rebalance" the literary works on your device, but they could alter them without your consent. Amazon has, at least once, completely deleted a work from all Kindles where it was installed when a copyright case came up about it. I do believe they issued a refund, but that doesn't quite match the experience here. (NC/PS didn't delete your procs, they changed how they work.)

Apple and Google can and have completely removed paid applications from their respective phones, but these are, generally, produced by third parties. Such removal are usually only done when the product is deemed harmful, such as severe malware. That situation doesn't really apply here: if you paid for those products and want some recompense for the removal, you have to go after the developer, not the operators of the app store. There are no third-party items on the Paragon Market.

And the fact that these commercial comparisons don't line up well with the Paragon Market is in itself important. CoH is a situation similar to but very distinct from these others: a walled garden where all the products and services make sense only within that garden's own context. You can't sit down in your armchair and experience your SBEs or new paid powerset unless you can log in to CoH from said armchair. Movies and books have a context outside their viewers, but SBE procs don't have a context outside of CoH.

If NC/PS took away a persistent in-game item you had bought, then I would argue strenuously that they should offer compensation. That isn't what's happened here.

My point was that I think they need to work harder to avoid getting into that position with items they sell for extra. They'll never make everyone happy when they make changes like this once they get into the position of needing to change them. But I think they could have avoided getting into this position with SBE procs to start with by listening to feedback given about the strength of these items in beta. If there had been no one expressing concern about them, that would be one thing, but a decent number of people did.

I'm of the opinion that PS should not set the precedent of giving refunds, because MMOs are always subject to change, and people will demand refunds based on precedent if they were ever given for any change that affects something they bought. That slope is too slippery, in my opinion. But I also believe that they should set a higher bar for effort to avoid situations that cause items to change soon after being put up for sale, relative to the effort they might put into changes in things that are part of the base subscription.

While I tend to side with the developers on this in principal, I agree with what I think is the spirit here, at least in the sense that it feels like they rammed these things into production. They worked technically - they didn't crash the servers or one-shot Hamidon or anything like that. But they don't really seem to have a strong feel for their place in the game's balance at the point where they went live. When you do that with something you're selling for extra, that's just asking for unhappy customers.

This game, and everything in it, is a service. Everything in City of Heroes exists only because that service is provided to you. You paid for your service to have extra features. It still does. The owner of the service changed the nature of that feature which they deliver as part of their service.

I haven't tested it either, so I can't be positive. I'm just noting the difference in what LN and the patch note were describing (or how they were respectively saying it).

LN does test a lot of stuff, though.

I'm not sure if you posted that before reading all of Synapse's updates, but that won't count against you. It's only the slotted recharge component (including Alpha Spiritual, if applicable) that does reduce proc rates.

That patch note doesn't preclude what LN is saying.

He is saying it is limited to activating once per cast of the power it's slotted in (which agrees with the patch note), but that it still checks each target until it gets that activation. That distinction would be important, because it would increase the odds of activation based on the number of targets hit instead of just having the base proc chance.

I think it never made it into the patch notes (despite that being pointed out in Beta), but they gave it something like the make-over that Siphon Life in Dark Melee got a long time ago now - it does more damage on a shorter recharge, while the healing was left alone.

This is a dangerous view in game design, and I'm pretty sure it's one the devs will never agree with. So long as it is a pillar in your position, I think you're going to argue to deaf ears in terms of the people who matter.

"Balance" of the sort you're talking about is pretty subjective. This game's complex interactions of various buffs and debuffs means it's exceptionally hard to assign numeric "damage equivalency" values to specific non-damage effects. Because of that, balance for those sorts of things go by feel, not formula. That doesn't mean, though, that efforts to balance them are ignored.

However, it does mean that relative balance of powersets its something of a dart board exercise. They do take aim at a bulls-eye, but near misses are acceptable. Therefore, when viewed in any particular, narrowly-defined performance metric, such as DPS, some powersets are winners and losers. And the devs are OK with this, so long as the powersets don't win or lose by too much.

I think it's a heavy burden of proof to show that Staff lies outside the devs' "near miss" target area for powerset balance. It's good to raise concerns to them, in case they might agree, but I think you need to be careful about the firm assumptions you make about what design approaches are "right" and "wrong". If you go into things sounding like you're telling the devs they "did it wrong", you're less likely to get them to take you seriously.

I don't want that as a gimmick for a new powerset. I want that added to all the existing primary/secondary self-rezzes in the game.

It looks like you might be late to the thread. If you posted in here earlier, forgive me - I'm following a number of active threads.

First, only slotted recharge matters based on the latest proposal. So the effect you're describing won't be dynamic.

However, for people attacking with full attack chains (either due to having a nice dose of recharge, plenty of attacks, or both), the effect of recharge on powers won't be what you described. Their fixed activation time prevents it, and keeps doubling the recharge from doubling your attack rate. It approaches what you're describing when the activation time of the power is small compared to its base recharge time, but the closer the two get, the less accurate that description becomes.

For single target attacks it's relatively straightforward. There's basically a cycle time where each PPM proc will be equal to a given flat-rate proc. Below that a PPM procs less often, and above it a PPM procs more often. Here's what chance to activate looks like plotted versus cycle time (in seconds) for some various PPMs and flat rate values. Remember that the cycle time shown here needs to be cycle time including enhancement.


Now, we can also plot effective PPM vs cycle time (again given in seconds). In theory, this gives a bit more clear sense of how much more powerful than PPMs high %-chance procs are in fast cycling powers, and how much worse in slow-cycling ones. However, this is a much more theoretical graph, because it assumes you always fire the power the proc is slotted in immediately every time it's recharged.


The reason that may not reflect real performance is that, in high-efficiency attack chains, this tends to be less true the shorter a power's cycle time, because we end up recharged while some other attack is still activating. A truly perfect attack chain would activate every power just after it recharged, but such perfection is very rare in practice, so our real cycle times tend to be a bit longer than the ideal. This has less impact the longer the base cycle time of the power, since time spent waiting on some other power to finish activating becomes a smaller percent of one cycle the longer a cycle is.

There's a limit to this. If something underperfoms too much, it should be improved, regardless of how fun it is. Whether something is fun is subjective, but things like how fast it levels are not. Some spread in performance is acceptable, but at some point, the devs have to decide that outliers lay too far afield and need to be brought closer. They've done this many times in many different ways.

We can't just look at whether something looks cool or feels neat. It also needs to perform comparably, but not identically to other characters, for some measurable metric. The devs tend to look at leveling speed, but they sometimes listen to other arguments.

Note that I am not convinced Staff needs anything. But if I thought it did, "it's fun anyway" wouldn't dissuade me from asking to having it looked at. People having fun with it shouldn't have to "buy" their fun at the expense of too much performance.

Right. That's what I was referring to in my closing sentence. If your area is too small to fit your actual target cap in the effect, then the area ends up dominating.

Basically, there's some size that's the absolute minimum size required to fit your target cap in the attack. But even if you can fit your whole target cap in the effect, there's still the question of how likely that is to actually happen. So an attack with an area just big enough to fit its target cap in standard-sized critters in it probably still shouldn't get its full target cap as its rating. As area grows over that required to fit the target cap in, it becomes more and more probable that you fit the max in the effect*. As you say, many melee powerset attacks never actually grow that large, so they don't benefit strongly from this effect. Something like FootStomp is getting big enough relative to its target max that it probably should count close to all of them. Shadow Maul, not so much.

* Some things, like Judgement powers, can hit so many targets they only should count at full strength under the assumption of high difficulty settings or team/league play.

To be blunt, the claim is completely ludicrous. That your analysis concludes that tells me, point blank, that I shouldn't believe anything you say about any powerset comparisons using that analysis as your foundation.