UberGuy

I do not believe so, based on postings by other players who have done the testing. However, I can't personally answer that one authoritatively, since all my knowledge of the detailed mechanics is thanks to the testing of others.

In general, you'd be better off to put the Stalker ATO "re-hide" proc there.

You have to include cast time. That's 1.188 + 6 = 7.188. The chance of the proc going off is CycleTime/60*PPM, or 7.188/60*3 = 0.3594. So the SBE is better by almost 1.8x.

Huh? It is? This is something that is completely alien to me. Why would anyone lose interest in something they are interested in over the course of a month or so? About the only way this makes sense to me is if the people in question are not playing CoH at all, and they end up being away for so long that they get engrossed in something else instead and never come back.

I honestly, truly cannot grasp that concept.

Standard ATO procs are 4 PPM, and Superior ones are 5 PPM. Most of PPM versions of "20% chance" procs I looked at, such as Mako's Bite, are 3 PPM as SBEs. ToD SBE's are 2.5 PPM. The proposed SBE Hecatomb proc comes in at 4.5 PPM, potentially subject to change.

Some of the procs, such as Performance Shifter, apparently did not work out as expected when put passives or toggles, with their very fast re-activate rates. The original PPM PS proc was about 2.5x better on average than a Miracle unique. (This is one reason I don't have much sympathy for anyone who bought a bunch of them on the basis of working out what the original PPM meant in terms of endurance recovered / minute. I think anyone who knew how good they were - and used that as a reason to buy them - was, shall we say ... unreasonably optimistic that they would not be changed.)

First, let me repeat my thanks to you for posting this when you didn't want to give details. I actually do appreciate that.

I do not quote most of the post below, because I have no specific comments or rebuttals to most of it. You can assume that anything I don't reply to below I either agree with or at least accept without argument.

I would say here that I consider an awful lot of science fiction to already require this acceptance. Consider Arcanaville's comments about Superman's powers being "fueled" by our sun's radiation. That is couched in terms that suggest it relies on as-yet-undiscovered physical laws, but as presented, we know with almost complete certainty that it's actually not possible. Perhaps the difference in effect this has between you and I is that I put the possibility of such a thing being possible under the physical laws of the universe at about the same level of likelihood as of magic being real, but well-hidden from most of the people on Earth.

It seems to me that this is not a simple matter of willing suspension of disbelief. It's not just that magic stretches your credulity to the breaking point. Rather, it's that magic introduces things that you wish to actively reject. In theory you could accept the impossible things "magic" allows, but you don't want to because you disapprove of their thematic implications. They aren't any more unbelievable than the non-magic things, you just don't like them in your setting.

If I go to, say, a movie that introduces magic, gods, etc., I can choose to suspend my disbelief in those things. If the movie breaks my suspension of disbelief, it usually does so by presenting those things in internally inconsistent ways, by plain plot holes, or by bad acting. That's quite separate from me going into a movie and deciding I'm not going to invest in it because I find the notion of real magic, gods and the like distasteful.

I find this while sentence quite bizarre. I see no meaningful indication that you have done what you say, nor any way you can claim to know you have done it more deeply than I. I made no claims about the form of magic from which you could make such an inference, nor did you previously clearly claim to reject it on the basis of its form. My obvious conclusion is that this near-closing comment is an unfortunate stamp of malarkey on an otherwise thought-provoking post.

I think you're mistaking Arcanaville pointing out when you do yourself a disservice for Arcanaville doing you a disservice. If you aren't open to even the possibility that anything is wrong with your own assertions or arguments, I can see where you might feel otherwise, though I don't think that necessarily follows.

I might add that I think there are significant differences in the two threads. The Blaster thread is about whether Blasters actually survive long enough to perform the role they have (to the extent that they actually clearly have a role). In contrast, Tankers seem to have a very specific role: aggro management. You seem to disapprove in at least some ways with that role being their primary remit, but don't actually seem to feel that they have special problems performing that role. You want a wider or even different role for them.

Well, and of course the Blaster thread started as a Blaster thread, and this was a Scrapper thread that you coopted.

* Files away potential means of driving PleaseRecyle mad for future contingency...

That's nice, I guess. Maybe. Personally, I think its valuable to point out logical flaws in posts, even if I have no stake in the discussion. It's not because I enjoy suggesting people are mistaken, but because if I think they're posting something that's incorrect, they're not likely to get what they want even if they get what they ask for.

Hm, wait, did I misattribute that quote? I thought Neuronia posted that...

Edit: I did. Sorry, dude, I think that was a multi-quote mishap. I was trying to respond to Neuronia.

For what it's worth, I appreciated your post, and do want to reply to it. (And not to trash it.) I just have had time yet - it's been a busy last two days. My reply to PleaseRecycle above is the longest thing I've had time to post.

Not sure it matters to you if I respond or not, but since I really pushed hard to get you to post it, I at least wanted you to know I did read it.

It's not a bug. The issue is that they don't work the same way. You can't compare them directly. PPM stands for "Procs Per Minute", and by design, they proc more often in powers that have longer cycle times. (Cycle time is cast time + base recharge time). The idea is to keep the average number of times they proc per unit time fixed instead of the average number of times they proc per power activation.

All SBEs that are procs use the PPM system.

There are two things involved that make this better than a standard proc.

One is that it's better by design in longer cycle powers. If it procs 20% of the time in something with a 4s cycle time, it will proc 40% of the time in something with an 8s cycle time.

The second thing is that you can improve recharge time with slotting and global recharge. So if you have something with an 8s cycle time that you can get down to 4s, then it's twice as good to put a SBE/PPM proc there rather than a regular proc.

I no longer proc FS on my Corrs and Defenders, but I do always attack immediately after terrorizing stuff, often including lots of DoT or rains, so things always attack back. There's a mondo toHit debuff on FS (and I always slot it for more -toHit than fear duration), and if you have a self-heal (particularly Twilight Grasp), you can recover from most anything that does land. I have long played Dark Miasma Defenders and Corruptors as damage sponges - they take lots of hits and heal it back. (Way more hits miss than land, I just make a habit of fighting rather insane quantities of foes.) My Dark/Time Controller is a lowbie still, but I fully expect to play it the same way in general.

Wut?

Seriously, what?

These days, I pretty much solo everything to 50. I have done that for a long time. Villain-side, I have soloed more Corruptors to 50 than anything else. I... have not had a problem. (And no, I don't IO them extensively, though I do fork out for some single goodies that help a lot, like a Miracle and a KB IO.)

I can't say a lot about how Dominators solo up these days, as I haven't played a lowbie one much since they were changed, but are you really suggesting MMs have a hard time getting to 50 solo? Really?

I will say that I think "legacy" heroside foes are generally easier, especially below level 40. Arachnos and Longbow are way more annoying than Family or Freakshow, and they're everywhere. But while I'll concede it's harder, it's not what I would call "punishing". Not in general. (Don't get me started on mid-level PPD SWAT. Whoever created them was a bad, bad person.)

Frankly, if I were your GM I'd tell you to stuff it. While what you're talking about can definitely be overused, and isn't a great story telling mechanism, it can have its place, and it's completely reasonable in such cases for the answer to be "no one else knows how" or even just "you can't". The GM should be able to tell you why - "because I said so" is a crap reason. But it's extraordinarily presumptuous of players to demand that anything they see an NPC do should be available to them to do also.

Mutation in this context, and in that of most comics but especially Marvel's universe, is that you have to be born with the ability, and the thing you're born with that distinguishes you has to be something people of your species don't normally exhibit.

Trolls aren't, as far as we know, ever born the way they are. They get that way by taking lots of Superadyne. That sounds like Science, to me.

My interpretation of Technology is that you need to be using some sort of tool. Usually that tool is external, but if not, it needs to be foreign to your body. There's a fine line somewhere in the range of nanotechnology where it becomes kind of subjective what's Science and what's Technology, but I tend to treat cybernetics and thematically "mechanical" nanotech as Technology.

If someone uses Technology to alter your body, you're Science origin, because your body was permenantly changed, but the Technology that effected the change is not present after the change is made. Often the Tech uses an intermediary effect, such as chemicals or radiation to effect the changes.

Natural is never something imposed externally on you, even if you are the one using the tools that make the imposition. It is something you attain through training and focus, and generally does not rely on any external tool. This gets a bit blurry if you're using a weapon, but the distinction I make is in whether the ability to do extraordinary things is due to the weapon or the user. If you can only take down other metas because you have a super-tech sword or pistol, and particularly if someone else armed with them could also do so, then that's Technology origin. If you can only take down metas because you personally have extraordinary skill using the (or any) weapon, then that could be one of the other origins, including Natural. (You'd be Natural in this case if you weren't a Mutant, weren't using powers imposed through Science effects, and weren't using Magic. In many if not all cases, Natural is what's left if you know you aren't one of the other origins.)

Actually, I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Most of the effects that grant the foe a debuff it uses on itself don't work that way. New applications are simply lost until the prior one expires.

Ditto.

Ah, so that sounds like it's using the same mechanic they added to Eagle's Claw for Scrappers. That would mean it's a chance of +50% critical hits that triggers some of the time and only lasts so long after triggering.