I'm not convinced that /EA is quite complete just yet.
That said, I think there are a host of reasons why /EA should not be positional, from variety, to theme, to IO build strategies to the cottage rule.
The cake is a lie! The cake is a lie!
EA for brutes might be done though. EA for proliferation is different. For brutes, the improvements made were minor, the dev probably don't think EA has much problem to start with. The buff were made probably just because we are annoying. 
I don't know if they will spend the time to look at it the second time.
Edit: Maybe they will look at the brute EA set the second time, but a couple years later. *giggle*
When castle annouced they were making some changes to EA he said that they have several changes they could make. and that they would be making minor changes first and after that if they felt EA still needs help, after data mining, they will make more changes.
Do I think EA still needs help? not really, but it wouldn't hurt.
and really if they Prof EA off to Scrappers or Tankers and they make significant changes to the set there will be a large outcry from players that allready have high level EA Brutes about how unfair it is, and yada yada. I'd expect the set to go to scrappers first by the way
V-Tronix - Angry Angels
V-Tron Elec/EM - V-Tron X EM/EA
To Build a Better Hero #53098 [Newly edited and looking for Feedback] - Renegade Robots: V-Tron's Task Force # - A Summer Song and A Winters Tail #104106
I expect on the next round of proliferations, scrappers will get ea and tankers will get electric.
Followed, almost immediately, by a massive buff to electric aura once the bluesiders realize just how massive some of it's problems are :P
This is also when I'd expect /EA to get it's final buff, to modify CP in some way.
It's also a little ironic that with current number scaling for ATs, /EA would make a fairly solid tank set. We might actually see something like that...
The cake is a lie! The cake is a lie!
I think a lot of /ea's 'problems' stem from the simple fact that it is compared to SR, and SR is severely overpowered.
Honestly, being able to softcap on a scrapper or brute with almost no effort pretty much showcases the fact that it has tanker-level defenses on scrapper-level ATs. SR is easier to softcap than ice armor, a Tanker set.
The problem is of course that defense is all or nothing. you either take a full hit or none at all. One of the reasons I like /ea is because instead of being all or nothing, it has decent defense, a little bit of resistance, and now a bit of healing as well. That allows the set to be good without breaking into tanker numbers.
electric armor, however, is exactly where a 'pure' resistance set should be on a brute or scrapper. And it shows pretty much exactly where SR should be if it were not dramatically overpowered... SR is a one-trick pony, and while that's a darned good trick, it should not, alone, allow a scrapper or brute to attain tanker-level survival.
the only OTHER set that allows a brute to attain tanker-level survival is granite, and it comes with significant drawbacks... and in truth, for a brute, the drawbacks are not quite enough to counterbalance that strong of a defensive set.
The problem is, that the devs know how binary a pure defensive set is... and to preserve the 'feel' of the set, they have made an error mandated by the game design itself. because of how binary defense is, the only way to have made SR have an appropriate level of survivability would be one of several things:
)Lower the amount of damage incoming by some method (in ice's case, CE does that) but that would have changed the feel of the set.
)Opt to give SR some residual resistance effect and increase the defenses beyond a reasonable level (The choice that the devs made)
)give SR a residual HP recovery power and kept the defenses at a reasonable level (The choice I think the devs should have made)
So, of course, now you have a set that is unbalanced for the sole reason that the devs knuckled under to 'concept' instead of balance... and now that the cat's out of the bag, the only way to 'fix' the set would be percieved as a massive nerf by the community, and not without reason. I think that they have decided that, in the end, SR is not a popular enough set that allowing it to remain in it's unbalanced state is particularly game-breaking, but the people who hang out on the boards (a minority of players, admittedly) know the truth... SR is entirely outperforming what a secondary should do for a brute.
Unfortunately, this perception has made a lot of people believe that SR is the 'baseline' for brutes. They think that Willpower meets this baseline because of damage-over-time numbers favor it (They absolutely do, willpower has a survivability metric for damage-over-time on par with pre-nerf regen) and that raw survivability favors it as well (It certainly does not, burst-damage wise, Willpower is absolutely bottom of the barrel compared to EVERY other set.) but willpower fortunately has a survivability metric right in the tolerance range where brutes like it... high survivability against up to 16 opponents of lut-class or lower, where brute damage is maximised and levelling speed is at it's peak.
Willpower has a weakness, which is low numbers of heavy-duty enemies. It is extraordinarily difficult for willpower to fight against a single heavy-attack foe, such as a lot of AV's with massive first-strike capability and consistently high-damage foes. This is a weakness shared by invulnerability and dark armor, and is pretty much considered par for the course for brutes... They are not tankers, and in a lot of cases brutes trying to 'play like a tanker' are ridiculed.
But SR is a deal-breaker. It has just as much strength against a single high-level foe as it does against hordes of minions. On brutes, this means that the classic hole of 'big nasty AV's' and giant monsters is no such thing... and due to the newest version of level scaling and Arcanaville's tireless efforts (Not to disparage her) SR has nearly the same amount of survivability against a +4 archvillain as it has against 16 +0 luts.
The biggest problem is, how to bring SR 'in line' as far as survivability with other scrapper and brute sets. The thing is, every effort to bring SR in line has wound up impacting other defense-heavy sets, such as inv and /ea, for more significantly than SR. and since the Devs have mandated 'no massive powerset changes' anymore, that means that SR is probably going to stay in it's current, broken state and continue to draw false comparisons against other, more balanced sets for the forseeable future.
But what this does NOT mean is that other sets that rely on defense are going to be unbalanced as badly as SR is. I am reasonably certain that /ea, /inv, and /ice are fairly close to where the Devs want defense set survival metrics to be. Apparently /ea was below that goal, and since it was virgin territory, precisely enough positive reinforcement was applied to bring it into line... I am pretty sure that the 'future adjustments' they were talking about were intended to brace the community for future nerfs should /ea prove too powerful, rather than leading people to expect future buffs.
Just for giggles, I decided to check out what SR would be with nothing but IO's on a tanker...
active+passive=26% per location. with 3 so's= 39% per location
39%???
yep
oh, and tack on weave for another umm... 7.5%
46.5%. to all locations. softcapped from nothing but SO's
oh, and of course .45% defense x3 powers per point below 60% health. that's 13.5% resistance per 10 points below 60%. that means that at 25% health (with tanker hit points, of course) yopu would have ummm... 46.5% defense to everything and nearly 50% resistance to everything that gets through.
one one power pool, with nothing but single-origin enhancements. By level 28.
Go ahead, try and tell me SR isn't overpowered 
contrast it to say...electric armor on a tanker:
35% resistance, or 52.5% resistance for a tanker.
with tough, 75% resistance to s/l.
And that's it. nothing else save some end drain that doesn't work all the great as mitigation. craptastic numbers against non s/l/e attacks.
but on the plus side, at least you can slot a 20% chance to heal 5% damage in your lightning field, right?
SR would, using current AT power scaling, be broken on a tanker.
That does not, necessarily, demonstrate that it's broken on a scrapper, brute or stalker. Sets often need to be modified, for transfer, or just not transferred (some defender buff sets come to mind as applied, or not applied, to controllers or MMs). In this case, because of the asymptotic performance of defence and resistance, the delta in transmitted damage for SR is most sensitive to that effect, since it uses single type mitigation, and thus starts out closest to the problem area.
Unless Tank SR were different than other SR, or unless DR were to be implemented for PvE, SR could not be transferred as is to tankers.
But as I mentioned, baseline performance for brutes and scrappers isn't necessarily broken. Given the current data mining method of powerset balancing, SR may well perform just where the devs want, and may quite probably underperform WP. From a monster barring point of view, IO'd SR is probably less problematic than IO'd WP, IO'd shield, or IO'd invul, which can all softcap, only with more tricks than SR. Comparing to SR, either on average data mined performance, or extreme performance might or might not yield the comparison you expect, or at least it's not intuitively obvious that it would.
As far as WP being weak against single opponents? that's not really something I've had much trouble with. I'll grant I do tend to build WP for survival with cj, tough and weave, and often with maneuvers or IOs. I don't really fight many AVs until the late 30s, and I generally have room by then for some extra survival.
The cake is a lie! The cake is a lie!
Well, Like I said...the compromise they made for SR was based around the way the engine works... it is potentially NOT broken on scrappers and brutes, but I think it's a basic engine problem.
One good side of seeing how broken defense scaling is in CoH.... it made me rethink my 'superhero' tabletop RPG, so that now I have to-hit, damage, dodging, and resistance all weighted fairly equally to allow various types of superheroes instead of that poor martial artist getting pasted any time he gets hit .
Yahoo Fudge.
[ QUOTE ]
Go ahead, try and tell me SR isn't overpowered
[/ QUOTE ]
SR is not overpowered. Its one-dimensionality means that migrating it to tankers is problematic because of the archetype scaling modifiers. But those were and are always broken as to intent: a band-aid for archetype scaling that didn't do what it was supposed to do even in their canonical situation: Invuln. The "75% rule" was dead on arrival as the 75% resistance cap and 90% resistance cap (which Invuln could reach for scrappers and tankers when those caps were put in) represents a 250% difference in survivability. Similarly, the 75% rule for modifiers means SR for tankers would be about 400% of the strength of SR for scrappers without modification. All you've proven is the modifiers don't always work right, which was known back in I2 (also, I did the SR to tankers calculation when powerset proliferation was first announced).
Ignoring endurance effects, for SR to have similar numerical mitigation as Electric, it would have to have about 20% defense. That's ridiculously low. Invuln has almost as much damage mitigation to psionic with slotted Dull Pain. In fact a good way to look at this assertion is that 20% defense, or 41% resistance (which Electric has to most types) is very close to just running perma-DP and nothing else at all, especially factoring in the heal.
Dark Melee has arguably far more damage mitigation in its non-damaging effects as that.
[Guide to Defense] [Scrapper Secondaries Comparison] [Archetype Popularity Analysis]
In one little corner of the universe, there's nothing more irritating than a misfile...
(Please support the best webcomic about a cosmic universal realignment by impaired angelic interference resulting in identity crisis angst. Or I release the pigmy water thieves.)
[ QUOTE ]
This is also when I'd expect /EA to get it's final buff, to modify CP in some way.
[/ QUOTE ]
For heroes, if the reason of modifying CP is because of the ancillary power pool, then the CP in the proliferated EA will need to be changed such that it is no longer performing a similar function as the original CP. But then such a change will be problematic to be ported back to brute's EA, because it is essentially removing CP from the set.
There's no reason CP couldn't be modified to do something similar to what it does now, and yet change it such that it also does something a little differently than the existing power.
I can think of many ways to do this which would not violate the concept, of the power or set, and which would allow current CP users to obtain a very similar effect.
A passive + HP + Max End
A passive slottable global endredux + end drain/recovery resist (similar in concept to TT:O)
A Click +recovery +regeneration power on the same timer as CP
A click +HP +End power on the same recharge as CP, or potentially lower numbers on the dull pain cycle.
And so on.
You get the same concept, you get a very similar (but potentially slightly better) power, you only offend the forum cottage rules lawyers.
The cake is a lie! The cake is a lie!
It depends on why you think it is necessary to avoid two CP. If you just think that it doesn't look good to have two powers that are exactly the same, then we can simply change it to something slightly different, like what you have suggested.
If the underlying reason of avoiding two CP is that there might be too many endurance management powers for EA (on top of energy drain), then a substitute power with +end or +recovery will potentially have a similar issue. On the other hand, to port the substitute power back to brute's EA, the substitute needs to have end/recovery component in it.
But anyway, it's just some thought on this issue. In principle, things can be tuned such that everything is right without offending most people. We'll see how firm the dev will stand on this so-called cottage rule.
Hey Arcanaville,
I've always wondered what would happen if SR was made in such a way that, instead of an increase in resists when health is low...you get an incremental increase in defense instead.
This would add to the thematic feel of depending on your speed and reflexes. In a sense...as you get closer to falling...you dredge up a bit more focus and fight that much better. The balance to this would be to introduce a permanent -hitpoint penalty for simply taking SR as a secondary. Would/could that work at all?
I mean...if your primary defense is to avoid damage...then you're not going to be all that robust in comparison to other guys who mitigate it in other ways.
[ QUOTE ]
It depends on why you think it is necessary to avoid two CP. If you just think that it doesn't look good to have two powers that are exactly the same, then we can simply change it to something slightly different, like what you have suggested.
If the underlying reason of avoiding two CP is that there might be too many endurance management powers for EA (on top of energy drain), then a substitute power with +end or +recovery will potentially have a similar issue. On the other hand, to port the substitute power back to brute's EA, the substitute needs to have end/recovery component in it.
But anyway, it's just some thought on this issue. In principle, things can be tuned such that everything is right without offending most people. We'll see how firm the dev will stand on this so-called cottage rule.
[/ QUOTE ]
I was thinking that CP could be changed to a faster recharging but less powerful End enhancement with some other things in it as well:
Boost Energy: Click power (300s recharge)
+150% Regeneration for 90s
+33% Enhancement(Endurance reduction) for 90s
+20% Enhancement(Defense) for 90s
+20% Enhancement(Heal) for 90s
Thoughts?
Deamus the Fallen - 50 DM/EA Brute - Lib
Dragos Bahtiam - 50 Fire/Ice Blaster - Lib
/facepalm - Apply Directly to the Forehead!
Formally Dragos_Bahtiam - Abbreviate to DSL - Warning, may contain sarcasm
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Shubbie
Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.
|
My thought is that this actually cripples one of the primary functions of CP, and that is minimizing your endurance expenditures while recovering from OL's crash.
truthfully, that's pretty much the only thing I use it for, since ED easily handles any other endurance issues the set might have.
It is not a bad idea, though, I just think it wouldn't be what is needed.
[ QUOTE ]
My thought is that this actually cripples one of the primary functions of CP, and that is minimizing your endurance expenditures while recovering from OL's crash.
truthfully, that's pretty much the only thing I use it for, since ED easily handles any other endurance issues the set might have.
It is not a bad idea, though, I just think it wouldn't be what is needed.
[/ QUOTE ]
If this happened to both EA and ElA then we could simply get Conserve Power in Mu Mastery.
Deamus the Fallen - 50 DM/EA Brute - Lib
Dragos Bahtiam - 50 Fire/Ice Blaster - Lib
/facepalm - Apply Directly to the Forehead!
Formally Dragos_Bahtiam - Abbreviate to DSL - Warning, may contain sarcasm
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Shubbie
Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.
|
To my mind there are the following uses for CP, roughly as I would personally rate them in importance (your mileage may vary)
1 Staminaless builds
2 PvP against anyone who attacks blue (I'm not totally current on this, and this may be less important in I 14, I don't know. I do know this used to be helpfull)
3 To mitigate the end crash after overload, whereby a player chews a blue, fires off end drain, and then gets lots of mileage out of that with CP up.
4 for concept
I fail to see why a power can't trade off some fraction of it's end management for other capacity and still maintain critical functionality for all the above.
That does not, of course demand that it "should" be changed, or that its the most important thing to change, though one definitely does have to consider the impact of a scrapper with two CPs...
The cake is a lie! The cake is a lie!
I'm a staminaless build and CP is great and needs to stay in the set right where it is unchanged, and if the set ever gets ported heroside and the players have the option to take two CPs, then so be it. I would not mind having two CPs.
Personaly I see the devs have 2 ways to address the double Conserve Power issue with EA being ported to Tanks or Scrappers.
1. Modify the power to function different that how Conserve Power works now (Global end reduction)
2. Making it so that if either the EA version or the APP Version is selected the other is not available. Similar how frag and toxic granades from the wolf and crab branches can't both be selectec.
personaly I see them going the later first.
V-Tronix - Angry Angels
V-Tron Elec/EM - V-Tron X EM/EA
To Build a Better Hero #53098 [Newly edited and looking for Feedback] - Renegade Robots: V-Tron's Task Force # - A Summer Song and A Winters Tail #104106
Going with VTron, It really isn't that hard to "blank" out a "double" power. They don't let you use a 1/3 or so of the melee sets with shields. It's not hard to gray out a power if a certain prerequisite is met, in this case "if the character already has conserve power, it will become unavailable."
This is really a non-issue, and don't see why so many people need to go crazy.
I don't think that there's any question that blanking a power is possible, and maybe it even is easy. I do not, however, think it's the right choice, unless just possibly the 5th power added to body mastery (once one is added) is one that synergises especially well with /EA, (and only especially well with /EA) to compensate.
That's a surprisingly tall order given the other sets out there, and short of some serious weirdness, nothing comes immediately to mind, but it might be doable.
Still, even if this were possible, I'd still consider it an ugly bandaid, but at that point it's down to personal preference, not balance considerations.
The cake is a lie! The cake is a lie!
[ QUOTE ]
1. Modify the power to function different that how Conserve Power works now (Global end reduction)
[/ QUOTE ]
Keep in mind there are a host of ways the power could be changed.
Even a shorter duration conserve power type effect, possibly with a +regen component, a + res component or some other effect, could work just fine.
Conserve power from the APP and CP from /EA can be used in specific ways. Different cycles are all it would require to change that.
There are a great many other options, I wouldn't think restrictively at this point.
The cake is a lie! The cake is a lie!
Rethinking what I posted earlier, a 3rd option they could go with. Make the effects not stack from the same caster. which would more or less force the user to only use one at a time. effectivly doubling the durration.
but I agree Spirit, there are probably a few billion things they could do with CP to change the powers effects while keeping it similar to how it is now.
personaly I wouldn't mind seeing some end drain resistance added into the set somewhere. I suppose CP would be a good a place as any to add that.
V-Tronix - Angry Angels
V-Tron Elec/EM - V-Tron X EM/EA
To Build a Better Hero #53098 [Newly edited and looking for Feedback] - Renegade Robots: V-Tron's Task Force # - A Summer Song and A Winters Tail #104106
Bummer
Oh well, no harm in trying 
Thanks SnowLace 