UberGuy

You might want to keep reading the thread.

Also, please stop calling this "bait and switch". Google it. It doesn't mean anything like this. Selling you a service that changes later is not what "bait and switch" means.

It's always easy to offer thanks when someone says they'll look at your specific concerns, but seriously, it's ridiculously awesome that the possibility for that to happen even exists. Thank you.

I asked Synapse because what makes sense or not to me may not be relevant. I think what you're assuming is the justification is silly unless they plan to make other changes. And if they are interested in making those other changes, I'd like to know.

"They have to realize that setting the percent chance off of base recharge while setting PPM rates to intersect non-SBE rates at 3-4s cycle times would be a massive increase in proc performance."

See how that goes?

Inferring intent from what is actually being implemented has consistently proven unwise. It might give the right answer, but it often does not.

No, that's an inferred meaning. We all know what happens when we assume, right?

This example makes me fairly unhappy, because of how it would translate to most of my level 50 characters.

I have the kinds of recharge slotting going on you're talking about here, but not for purposes of my attack chain. Things like Dark Miasma and Regen characters can benefit from much more global recharge than they need to build a full attack chain, and that +recharge isn't really going into things that I slot with procs. A Regen, for example, benefits from having lots or recharge for powers like Moment of Glory and Instant Healing, while a Dark Miasma benefits from it for things like Fearsome Stare and Howling Twilight. In "final" builds on these character types, I usually jack up my total recharge into the 200-300% range (150-200% global + 50-100% slotted) to benefit those kinds of powers, not my attack chain. But by doing that, using this example, procs that do go in my attacks end up with worse proc rates than they would be today with non-SBE procs.

A non-SBE purple proc today has a 33% chance to activate, and SBE versions have a 4.5 PPM. If the ToE proc had a purple equivalent, in this example it would only go off around 24.6% of the time.

Why? All it shows is that they changed their minds. We may not always enjoy it, but they're allowed to do that.

Synapse, could you give us just a little insight into the thinking behind the use of an area factor here? It confuses me that, for procs that affect foes (as opposed to the caster) you would want a proc to go off less when the power affects multiple targets.

It may seem strange to you that I find that strange, but let me explain why. In CoH, powers that affect multiple targets don't dynamically degrade with number of targets. So if your power deals 100 damage and can hit 5 targets, and you hit all 5, you always do 100 base damage to all 5 targets.

Most AoEs have some fixed assumption about average number of targets they will affect baked into their damage, recharge and endurance cost values, and if you happen to hit more than that average, using the power then is an efficiency win.

Things like today's damage procs used in such situations provide a per-target increase in damage efficiency to AoEs they're slotted in. If you hit 5 targets, a proc with an X% chance to go off (whether X is fixed or based on the power) on each target.

Making procs less likely to activate based on larger powers reduces this efficiency. I'm sure you intend it to, or you wouldn't have added it, but I'm trying to understand what thought process leads you to think that's important to do when our base powers don't act that way. If I have Aim, Soul Drain, Rage Fiery Embrace or even a DoT Interface Slot power, my AoEs all increase their damage on a per-target basis. What is the goal in singling out IO procs as a +damage mechanism that's not allowed to work this way?

I understand that there can be good reasons to limit the way that self-buffing procs scale with large numbers of targets. The Defender and Brute ATE procs come to mind as things you might want to average one activation per AoE. But it seems very alien to CoH's other mechanics to limit procs that affect opponents in this way.

Anything is possible, but that hypothetical change and this actual change are worlds apart in nature. Making everything use PPM mechanics is potentially disruptive to current builds, but not wildly disruptive in two regards.

• PPM procs are a pretty new thing. "Nerfing" their top-end performance is only strongly affecting cutting-edge builds, recently modified to take maximal advantage of them. IO set Defense bonuses have been around since I9. That's not to say they don't change old things - the ET change showed that. But it's rather reasonable for them to be changing PPM because it's still pretty new.
• Total loss of DPS in the worst "nerf" cases we're talking about is almost certainly less dramatic than the disruption to survival that would come from "slashing" defense bonuses. DPS contributions are linear, while +Defense and DR contributions to survival follow 1/(1-x).

So the devs could do anything, but I think drawing a line between this and dramatic changes to defense bonuses seems particularly tinfoil hat-ish from where I'm standing.

I mentioned early in the thread that I don't know that they aren't trying to do that, too, but I believe the way they implemented PPM rates initially suggests they are are not trying to make that specific change. They set PPMs so that, for single-target powers, PPM procs were break even with non-SBE procs for powers with cycle times of 3-4 seconds. Given that extremely few powers have less than 1s activation time and 2-3s base recharge times, that suggests they were trying to break even at a minimum on the vast majority of powers.

It may be a net gain in a static situation, but as soon as you get recharge buffs above whatever your baseline is, your proc rate will go down, and your attack rate may not.

I'm only vaguely concerned that the static situation will create a net nerf. I'm really not fond of the implications of the dynamic situation.

That makes my head hurt.

It has to, by definition, for the reason Hopeling mentions. (It's been mentioned by a bunch of people.) The question is how much the effect will be as a fraction of your total proc rate, which is a function of all sorts of things: the PPM rate of the proc, the size if it's an AoE power, the base recharge time of the power, how much total recharge you had before you were buffed, and how much you were buffed.

Edit: Let's try to put some realistic numbers to this. Consider that, under the current system, we have pretty easy access to proc rates in the 60-80% range on single-target powers. On a lot of builds, if PPM didn't increase, the new system Synapse described would drop the proc rate to around 30-40% range or less, because a lot of IO'd characters can churn out at least +100% total recharge between slotting and set bonuses. Same PPM at 1/2 the recharge time whould be roughly 1/2 the proc chance (I'm ignoring activation time.). But we know that the PPM rate will increase, so I'm hoping that will put us back up at least around 30-40% in powers with around 4s cycle times. (Consider that a current non-SBE purple proc is 33%.)

Now, if you have around 100% +recharge for a power (slotted + global), then something like speed Boost is going to reduce your proc rate to around 200/250 of its original value, which is 80%. So you'd go from 30-40% proc rate to around 24-32% proc rate.

It doesn't make sense for more recharge to be a detriment to proc rate when it doesn't actually benefit attack rate.

Really. There is no good balance justification for that to happen.

Also: see my example of different builds with the same primary, above.

Every playstyle might be considered important, but it should only be as important as it's prevalent. Breaking min/max builds almost certainly breaks a small minority of builds in play. If you have to break builds (and "have to" is always at the discretion of the game makers), that's the sort of thing you want to do - break the minority.

That doesn't really work out, though. If you have an optimized attack chain, a power can recharge before you would actually re-insert it into the chain. "Optimized" in this case doesn't mean you use each power exactly as it recharges. Instead it just means you use the powers in an order that allows the longest recharging of them to come back in time for the entire chain to work, and you order all the others in a way that maximizes DPS.

Once you've got such a chain, unless you get so much recharge that it actually makes a whole new chain optimal, you wouldn't change it. In practice, I doubt very many people who use fixed attack chains change them on the fly even when they find themselves blessed with enough +recharge to execute a better one.

When that's the case, any proc rate dependency on recharge time starts to look like a penalty in this situation.

It seems likely to only affect "chance to" procs, based on presumed intent, but we don't have formal word on that.

Edit: According to RedTomax's site, Attuned Numina's and Kismet uniques have no PPM nature to them, so they appear excluded by explicit design.

Cool. I know it's been brought up in some of the threads, too so hopefully he both acknowledges it and considers it to have merit.

When we were going to have both PPMs and flat-rate versions, the idea seemed to be that you could pick and choose the right one for the right power. Now that this won't be true, I'm hoping the idea that long-cycle-time powers should also be decent places to put procs. If so, that shouldn't automatically preclude them still being as good in fast-cycling powers as they are today.

What I don't know is whether they think how procs work on live is somehow too good. I don't know why they would think that, but I really have no idea what they think.

You're right that it sucks, but you are wrong that it's "bait and switch". It doesn't meet the commonly recognized legal definition of that term.

Changing something after you buy it is something else all together. Bait-and-switch requires that they are attempting to get you to buy something other than the advertised item at a higher price than the original item you were interested in.

Until we see the numbers, we don't know this is happening. It's worth mentioning the concern, but it's not worth making it into the sky falling, because it might not be.

You need to recognize that in a huge swath of powers, existing PPM procs are significantly better than standard procs. About the only single-target powers this is not true for are the most extreme of fast-cycling powers, such as Neutrino Bolt. If they both normalize on actual slotted recharge and increase the PPM rating, it could still work out that PPM procs will still be break-even with flat-rate ones in most T1-style powers that have around 4s base recharge times and get better in slower-cyclying powers.

The big concerns I have about the eventual implementation are for AoEs and toggle/passive powers.

I too am fond of the idea of a floor on the proc chance which could enforce that PPMs are never any worse than flat% ones. The creation of a 90% max rate suggests that this is technically possible (or will be in I24).