UberGuy

Yeah. When I said earlier that I wasn't pleased with how they've handled this, stuff like that is what I meant.

A factor of 20 sounds more like what happens if you soft cap both characters, and/or possibly cap the Invul's L/S resists.

Edit: Scooped.

Do you have pop-up info windows enabled in Mids? If you enable them and hover the mouse over the enhancements, it will show you all the set bonuses available from sets, and it will highlight those you are getting from that power in green.

For example, this is what I see when I hover over one of two Numina's pieces I have in one of my characters.

They were actually originally discovered by conversion of ATOs using Enhancement Converters. I haven't checked to see if you can actually buy them with various merits the way you can the ones that are live, but if nothing else you could convert the ones we can get on live. Unless they turned it off, you can buy unlimited Empyrean and Astral Merits from the Ouro venders, which you could use to buy both ATOs and large numbers of converters to use on them. Tedious, but certainly one way to obtain them.

My criteria were:

• It wasn't a completely new thing. The ATOs are completely new. The PPM PS proc was a version of something we already had, so we could compare it directly.
• Even for "replacement" procs like Makos and ToD, PPM procs are better in powers with longer cycle times than standard procs. But there's no analog for longer cycle times when talking about passives like Stamina, so there was no natural extrapolation that said it should be significantly better, at least in those powers.
• They sold Numinas, and the Numina's unique wasn't better. The non-PPM version has a 100% proc chance, so it can't get any better. A regular PS proc is a little better on average than a regular Numina's, and a store-bought Numina's is the same as a regular Numina's. That means the store-bought PS was significantly better than the store-bought Miracle, which is a big red flag to me.

BL, when you say things that seem misinformed or misleading, being challenged on them is not "being dragged through the mud". When you make claims, people are going to respond if they seem really out of whack or out of place. It's completely normal. If people are rude about it, that's one thing, but just the act of challenging what you say isn't rude.

Which isn't seem that special when you remember that a lot of Scrappers do get way more than 30% average damage mitigation (the benefit of 15% defense on top of nothing else) from their secondaries.

It should be noted that a lot of Scrappers (and melee characters in general) build for L/S defense, and not positional, which is what the Scrapper ATO offers a large bonus of. The Scrapers that tend to build most often for positional defense do so specifically because they already have a bunch of it, which means they need less of it to approach the softcap. These Scrappers are not usually slotting the ATO for its positional defense bonuses.

So can Scrappers. They're just not all ranged. On the upside, Scrappers have a whole secondary devoted to staying alive, so that even if they can't stack defense as high, they almost certainly come out ahead of Blasters in terms of net survivability.

Where Blasters may have too many attacks, Scrappers get those secondary powerset powers that keep them alive.

It's true that I can't think of a Scrapper that can do so. On the other hand, a Scrapper can split the superior ATO set across two powers and get +10% L/S defense.

The PPM procs you put in things like attacks and holds are pretty clearly intended to introduce average proc activation per time in click powers, instead of average proc activation per power activation. Yes, there's no way to introduce that without the new system being better in longer-recharging powers. So clearly there are increases in power present here. But did you really think it followed that, when slotted in the canonical places people slot PS procs, which happens to be an auto power, that these procs should deliver 3x the EPS recovery? Does that really make sense when contrasted with what the PPM procs do for click powers?

Its actual performance in recovered EPS was close to 3x better than a normal one when slotted in Stamina and similar powers. That made it 2x better than the best EPS recovery IO we can buy any other way: Miracle uniques. And those are, you know, unique.

If anyone bought the PS PPMs and didn't know they worked that way, then they didn't realize they were getting such a huge boost, and while they might be sad, they wouldn't feel shafted when it was fixed. The only way to feel like you were robbed to the extent that you would talk about involving a lawyer is if you knew how much better they were, and I don't see how that extent of superiority didn't seem out of place in passives.

The EULA relates to the entire game experience. Just because you pay extra for an item or service, so long as that item or service is a virtual item that exists only with the confines of the game, everything is covered unless the lawyers that wrote the EULA were very poor.

While I agree it sucks, that analogy is not apt. Your example there is of them completely removing something you paid for. That's not what happened. They determined that the performance of what you paid for was too good and adjusted it. They did not remove it, or even make it useless. They made it less good than it was.

Moreover, they did not falsely advertise. They didn't say, "hey, these are 2.5x as good as the next best comparable thing, everyone come buy them now!" They put them out, realized they screwed up, and changed it.

There are a lot of things they could have done better. They could have communicated their error better. They could have tested it better before it went live - it seems pretty lame to me that they didn't notice how it works in the one power they have now pretty clearly tune it for.

However, while I have sympathy for your situation, I don't have empathy with it. All the PPM procs have a tendency to be better than "standard" ones, but Performance Shifters were so much better as to raise red flags immediately when I saw them. I had every expectation the devs would adjust them, and would have been absolutely floored if they had not.

For you to have wanted them quite so badly, you must have known how much better they were than normal ones. And if you knew how much better they were than normal ones, you should have known they were far too good to be true.

If I'm right about that, it leads me to think that you were counting on them not being able to adjust them because people bought them - something I would never assume about anything in an MMO because of the well-known advisement that the experience in an MMO is subject to change.

Again, if the devs are smart, they will handle this better go-forward. But no one should ever assume that because they buy something in an MMO that it cannot be adjusted later without compensation. There certainly are limits, and courts are hardly always sensible about where they decide those limits are, but so long as the company can show that a change was made as a good-faith keep things balanced in their product's environment, I don't think a case against this would have much merit.

Whether that leaves you willing to give them your money for things is another matter. It's completely within your rights to deny them your money for what they did and how they went about it. As someone who likes the game, I would clearly prefer they did not piss off other customers, even when they do not piss me off, and I do think they handled this much less well than they could. But I do not think you could sue them over it.

On Brutes (and Tanks), the devs have made sure that something is a taunt aura, even if it provides no such benefit to Scrappers. For example, one of the defense toggles in SR taunts for Brutes and Tankers, as does Integration in Regen for Brutes.

Where they have a damage aura but no "natively" taunting toggle like Invincibility or AOO, the damage aura is usually the place this is put. Blazing Aura for Fiery Aura taunts for Tankers and Brutes, but not Scrappers.

Well, back when it made Tankers melee AoE machines, the big attacks did hit foes further away than the dinky ones... Does that count?

Oh, it was fixed. That was wonderful(ly broken) when you recall that back then NPCs didn't obey any bounding boxes with respect to one another, and would stack without limit in a given spot.

I killed myself more than a few times popping ET on too many foes at once. It didn't matter much, though. I think I essentially PL'd my Inv/EM about 10 levels abusing that.

That's a pretty common tactic, in a broader sense, presumably because it seems to get good results. People will say a RWZ raid has "shields about to drop" when only a couple of pylons are down, or "couple spots left" on an iTrial that's only half full, and people will often jump right in. Tell them "*TF forming, room for 6" and you'll often wait longer.

I'm not really sure how that example establishes shenanigans. If you could show that such a thing was being achieved by lots of people all the time then you would potentially have a compelling counterpoint.

Granted, we're talking about a potentially misremembered dev comment given second hand, but I'm gathering that your claim of shenanigans is based on the assumption that a dev actually said what Fulmens remembers. If they did say that, your screenshot doesn't disprove it as a general observation. It just shows that it's not always a disaster for the Blaster.

I use all those things, but there is no such thing as "extra" endurance in most of my builds, barring the one that uses T4 Ageless Core. I run lots of toggles and I build for sustained DPS - the kind of thing you need if you're going to spend 3-5 minutes firing attacks non-stop to take down am AV or Pylon or something like that. Running Maneuvers instead of CJ when it's not in the build's budget for other powers is not an option given how I play. However, on the builds that do have Maneuvers, I typically run both. So it's not a matter of "CJ instead of Maneuvers". It's a matter of "CJ always and sometimes also Maneuvers".

Running Ninja Run in combat is horribly endurance inefficient. Not only is it an expensive toggle, you can't directly reduce its end cost unless you have a power like Conserve Power. Moreover, you can't benefit from NR's movement while active in combat, because it suppresses when you attack. (This is true of "real" travel powers, too.)

Edit: Like PleaseRecycle, I use binds to toggle between various travel powers and things like CJ. On some characters that does include Ninja Run. I keep those bound to buttons on the sides of my mouse, so changing travel modes is a matter of moving my thumb or ring finger. (This is something I find very useful with Fly/Hover.)

Was this because you only bought the cheap-o ones? Because the ones that used to be most expensive are now cheaper than they have been in ages.