UberGuy

No, you aren't. You're being asked to show things that can't be picked apart easily. Because so far, that's what you've done, as far as I can tell.

I get that you've put a lot of work into these posts. They're long and detailed. I, personally, am not claiming you've not made an effort. But if I understand you correctly, you're saying that everyone who disagrees with your work needs to provide proof that Staff is not subpar. But that's not what everyone is saying. We're pointing out flaws in your work. It's your thesis that Staff is sub-par, and you're putting out the documentation you claim that shows that. When your documentation contains errors, it's not suddenly beholden on anyone else to produce documentation saying that Staff is fine. All we're doing saying that you aren't successfully showing that staff is not fine.

I don't have a metric I want you to use. I just know that the ones you have used have had problems, the presence of which undercut my willingness to trust the conclusions you drew from them. (To be specific, your original DPA ordering that showed Broadsword equivalent to Katana on ST DPS, and now the latest list showing Stone Melee with better AoE than Staff.)

You asking people like me to prove that sort of info is wrong is, in my opinion, akin to demanding someone break out a proof when you assert the sun is green or February has 47 days. We're not going to bother, we're just going to conclude you're wrong and move on, and we're going to advise other people not to give your claims a lot of credence.

I know. That's why I said "enhanced recharge". (But you may not have been directing that only at me.)

For powers changes, I do understand that. But feedback on the Hecatomb SBEs was asked for a decent bit before they were put in the market, and they told us they were looking for not just technical feedback, but how we reacted to them putting purples up for sale. Now, I don't think they were specifically expecting the PPM thing to bubble to the fore the way it did, but that particular area became a mix of both technical and "gut" feedback: "These seem really strong, and if you put them up for sale, you need to be really careful that this is what you mean to be selling." Especially given how it was on the coattails of the Performance Shifter change. What happened? Hecatomb went up for sale anyway, and now the Heca PPM proc is going to be changed after folks bought it possibly on the basis of how it works now. (Unlike PShifter, which I think people had to be crazy to think was WAI, we have dev posts explaining how PPM procs currently work in click powers, which has a strong implication of it WAI.)

Now, there could be sound reasons that aren't down to greed why the Heca set went up for sale after that feedback and before Synapse's announcement of planned changes, but it doesn't leave a good taste in the mouth of someone who was leaving that feedback.

I really, honestly and deeply appreciate the way Synapse is working with the forum community in this thread, and it's not the only example of that sort of collaboration going on right now. I don't want anyone to think I'm only focusing on the bad. But I also don't want to focus only on the good. I think the Hecatomb bit in particular, and to an extent ATE procs as well, is a bit of a debacle.

Huh. Thanks. I missed that.

Combat, look in the mirror. You didn't make bold statements while showing nothing. You're being quoted as making bold statements that are ludicrous on their face. Sure, you then go on to point out that you understand that the method has flaws, but then seem to try and say it still is "good enough" to make your point. And yet, it throws in front of us things that anyone with a lick of sense knows are false. We're supposed to be comforted that this is good defense of your position?

I'm sorry, but whether or not Arcanaville has shown a rigorous proof of her claims, she has definitely not shown an obviously flawed proof in defense of them, while you have, twice now, actually. At this point, I find her claims more compelling than yours.

Why is it so hard to imagine that they wanted to improve the overall behavior of the proc system? Especially when they told us they were trying to.

If he bought it from the store, it's a PPM proc, not a flat 33%. And today, the proc rate is a function of base recharge, where in I24 it will be based on enhanced recharge. PPM procs are being nerfed, no doubt, and Paragon as a whole hasn't done a very customer friendly job of mingling sale of these items with feedback.

Feedback was posted in the I22 beta forums saying that things like purple PPM procs seemed too good to be true, yet they went on into the Paragon Market unchanged, and now a future downgrade is pending.

They wanted to. The original version of PPM would have nerfed more people than the one they're working on now, so they didn't do it. They told us this. So they attached PPM to attuned procs instead, and left the existing ones alone.

Then people in the beta forums in particular complained about how much better PPM was than standard procs, and started requesting a middle-road solution. This combination apparently compelled them to go back and look harder at how to both tone down PPM and make its low end look more like flat-rate procs.

While true, bear in mind that this is one of the core balancing formulas calculating damage (and thus endurance cost and recharge) for AoE powers. This is called the AoE factor. (Specifically, the proc chance is using (1+0.75*AoEfactor) as a divisor for proc chance). That means that AoE damage efficiency today has the same characteristics you describe: large arc AoEs with low target caps deal less damage per target than small arc AoEs with higher target caps. Target cap is simply not included.

Then, to be perfectly frank, they should just stay away from IOs.

I understand your point, and to a degree I can agree with it. But for anyone who cares deeply enough about how their build performs to miss even as much 10% shaved off a proc's activation rate, this is trivial complexity compared to what we're used to going through.

I know Synapse badly needs to update his original post, but please, at least read all of his posts using the dev digest.

I came up with almost exactly 90% for the Superior version of the Stalker proc slotted in Assassin's Strike, and that's with 100% slotted recharge. So anything significantly less than that amount of slotted recharge would definitely slap into the cap. That's PPM 5 and a 15-second base recharge time.

If you buy it now, it will probably work the way it does now until I24, at which time it will change somewhat.

Each store-bought proc has a description that says it will "go off roughly X times per minute". To find out how often it will currently activate in any given power, you need to know that power's base, unslotted recharge time and activation time. Add those two together, and then divide that time by 60 and multiply by the X from the proc's description. That's the chance the proc will activate in that power, each time you activate it, but the most it can go off is obviously 100% of the time

In I24, you will need to use the enhanced recharge time instead of the base time, and PPM rates will go up slightly. For most builds, this will probably cut the proc rate to somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 of what you'll get today. Additionally, the maximum chance for it to activate will be 90%, not 100%.

Hopefully that info can help you decide what makes the most sense. We can't really tell you if it makes sense to buy them now, later or ever. It depends on what's important to you, and what you think of the numbers you can get using the above info.

Ooh, neat. Thanks!

Eh... You can slot ToD in any melee attack, while you have to have -toHit to slot Cloud Senses.

But I don't disagree with your larger point. There doesn't seem to be a clear reason why ToD's proc has a lower rate/chance, even though ToD can be slotted in any attack.

Fixed-rate procs also average always the same thing. The only difference is that with fixed-rate procs, that same thing you always average to varies with power and power slotted recharge, and PPMs do not.

For you to dislike PPM, you need to dislike that the average varies based on where you slot it. You're still gambling. It's OK to dislike things for subjective reasons, but the aspect you subjectively dislike should actually exist.

That would be spiffy.

Have fun with that.

Here's the problem. Because how it was "designed" isn't in line with what was "intended", they were screwed. They could make it good in click powers but be insanely good in autos and toggles, or they could make it good in autos and toggles and suck in click powers. Right now they can't make it sensible in both.

How often do you see Performance Shifters in click powers in proposed builds on these forums? Compare that to how often you see them in Stamina, Quick Recovery or Physical Perfection. If they wanted the SBE acted most like they "intended" for the most people, which should they choose to fix?

Look, I'm not saying you have no reason to be annoyed. I say this in just about every thread on this topic . I feel that, across the sub-teams involved in creating and selling them, ranging from marketing to the powers team, the collective handling of designing, testing, marketing and selling SBE procs has not been very good.

But I think it's ridiculous to carry on with seeming insistence that the only explanation for how this played out is that they were out to screw us all, particularly when it comes to focusing just on the powers aspects. The actual changes they have made make too much sense for the changes to be them trying to screw us. Feel free to go on refusing to accept this, but I know that (a) the original PShift PPM piece was brokenly too strong, (b) brokenly too-strong things get fixed, and (c) the fix they implemented has unfortunate side effects but makes perfect sense given how most people use Performance Shifter procs.

They used to work for me, but they broke the bejesus out of them when they made all the changes that completely borked the forums for a few weeks. The forums got fixed, but the RSS feeds never did.

That's nice and all, but it was stated that changing them to not be as good as they are now was explicitly something they are trying to do as part of all this.

Yes, that means they decided that SBE/PPM procs were too good, and part of this whole process is basically to nerf them.

When a dev tells you that, you can try to stand your ground and "fight" them, or you can start trying to work with them to make the change they've already decided on as gentle as you can. Game theory says the smart money is on working with them, because the odds of working against them being successful is pretty small.

I'm not excited to lose the proc rates I get from my PPMs, all of which are ATEs. But I'll be completely honest - I could not believe they gave them to us in their current form. I didn't gripe about them or ask them to be changed. I used them with a smile and steeled myself for the possibility that they would change. And I did not spend money on PPM procs, since you can buy the ATE ones in-game.

There are things that have gone far, far longer without change and then been nerfed. Perma-T9s. Energy Transfer. Shield Charge. Blessing of the Zephyr. Compared to things like that, this is actually pretty fast turn-around by the powers team, though that's faint praise. But they didn't leave PPMs in their current form out long enough to meet my sense of "well, they actually seem OK with this." Unlike, say, BotZs.

Now, I do not think PS as a whole is handling the combination of the balance changes and fact that these are for-sale items in a customer-friendly way. That's not any one part of the PS team's fault, in my opinion. I wish they'd tweaked these sooner in the sense that we really did tell them so, at least as soon as we really figured out how PPMs worked. (They didn't really make the existence of PPM mechanics clear in betas, as far as I noticed. There was no patch note explaining it, so I don't think it got much testing.) They really got lots of attention when ATEs came out.

Edit: Sorry to respond after you said you were done. I had this open for a while while I was running trials.

PPM procs and "flat rate" procs are both random. The only difference is that the PPM proc has code that varies the value it compares to the number it gets back from the RNG to to check for activation, where the "flat rate" proc always checks the RNG against a static value. The PPM procs use this dynamic control to set the activation threshold in a way that targets a given PPM activation rate.

In my opinion, targeting a PPM rate and simultaneously setting a ceiling are, in fact, in conceptual conflict. However, that's being done because there is actually an external design constraint being imposed - that random things should not be allowed to achieve a consistent 100% chance to happen, because then they cease to be random. PPM procs are random things, so their chance to activate should not be allowed to reach 100%.

Edit: To use Arcanaville's post as a springboard for further clarity, what most of us refer to as "procs" conceptually act like this.

On Activation of Slotted Power:

• Get number from RNG
• Compare number to activation threshold
• If RNG value was > threshold
  • Activate additional effect
• Else
  • Do nothing

In contrast, things that are not procs, like Miracle unique pieces, conceptually act like this.

On Activation of Slotted Power:

• Activate additional effect

I believe that what Synapse is saying is that things that act like my first pseudo code should not be allowed to achieve a threshold value that reaches 100%, meaning they always get an RNG number and then always pass the threshold test. If they perform that test, they should have a limit on the threshold so that it's always possible to fail the test.

Actually, Synapse pretty much directly contradicted the belief that Miracle/Numi/Celerity are the same thing as "X% chance of" procs, earlier in this thread.