What can the other secondaries do better than /Shield?

Isn't that a double ding, or will that really smooth things out, since doing a shield charge inside the radius of AAO has the potential to give a huge damage buff while doing so outside of AAO radius even with long distance factored in could be a huge difference in damage.

I agree 100% with this. Honestly the inaccuracy purported in this thread by Castle has me wondering how far off numerous other situations could be. I know I gave a big "you're kidding right?" when they increase the damage of SC by 50% not very long ago, but it seemed hunky doory with QA and the devs.

Now we are in a situation where the playerbase has grown accustomed to the performance and to reach balance it needs to be literally slashed in half. A downward shift from 133 as introduced to 106 would be a lot easier to swallow than dropping it from 200 now. Either that or even more time needs to be sunk into the power making it behave uniquely and abide by its own ruleset. I'm personally fine with "special cases" but how many cracks does it take to get it dialed in?

Lastly I have to agree about Castle looking at rikti pylons and making sweeping generalizations, and I think everyone should note how quickly we all jumped on him for that. The issue for me is Castle seemingly unaware that a persistent 81% damage buff would result in roughly ~35% faster kill times. That is disconcerting as the disconnection between the spreadsheets and actual performance might be cavernous. It is kneejerk reactions like that that sound disturbingly like "everyone laughs at you if you don't take EM".

The last thing I want to touch on with regard to Shields is that people seem to forget that it is the only armor set in the game that actually buffs teammates (and pretty well at that). That unique property may not carry much value to a solo shielder's mitigation value, but it has to carry value somewhere in the grand scheme. It can buff with more def value than a FF controller's dispersion bubble. That is not insignificant.

I pretty sure that is intended. That way you get equitable performance for using the power "as intended" ie to charge and you don't feel pressure to soak up AAO fodder and cast the power at your feet. Yet if you decide to do the latter it will still perform on par with charging from a damage standpoint.

Actually he didn't look at Rikti Pylons and make sweeping generalizations. He looked at player statements that Set A is half again as powerful as Set B and inquired if some attention was warranted (with a subtext that he hoped not). No mention was made by the contributing posters of special caveats or circumstances to qualify the acknowledged "50%" case until after the question was raised. Nor did Castle make any statement of intent or conclusions-drawn from that discussion. Indeed, what will ultimately be done about the one concrete thing to come out of the discussion (that Shield Charge was producing more damage than the internal design documents said it should) is still up in the air.

"Castle monitors the Rikti Pylon soloers to locate where to make nerfs" is a radical interpretation of the text.

Thank goodness that isn't being said by anyone other than you. Or even implied. But you might want to reread his comments in this thread with regard to "300dps pylon solo'ers" and how he was thinking of pinning that on fire and DM (and may still be).

It is well documented how Shielders leverage AAO to produce higher st damage, it shouldn't require an asterisk each time you mention the set. Certainly not when you are talking with the person who is in charge of the whole shebang. That said I know I personally made mention quite a few times of the relative performance levels with and without AAO in effect. So I'm not sure how much clearer it needs to be laid out considering the "caveat" was already mentioned several times.

Yes, and... at this point I would take great glee in discussing lackluster single target damage, no second AoE power, how buffing the heck of of SK while nerfing TK made the set overly reliant on Hasten for its lackluster smashing damage, and the fact that hitting the long recharge top tier attack substantially reduces the set's DoT *but* that would be a threadjack so let me say this:

While I agree that Shield Charge is probably too good, I still think AAO is more the offender than SC if the issue Castle is concerned about is pylon damage. At it's best AAO is roughly 8 times as effective than Assault for toggled damage. That's more toggled damage than any other power in the game. Take away Shield Charge and /Shield characters are still blowing away other scrappers in single target damage on pylons or other places where they can leverage the extra foes.

Originally Posted by Nights_Dawn Hazy is right

Heh... I think the powers team did exactly that during I17 development, but if you find any still uncapped I'm sure Castle would be glad to know.

I doubt the devs care about pylon damage in particular... that's a fairly artificial situation since it's a stationary target that poses no real threat to the ATs that solo them and gives no real reward. Regarding AaO in general, it's quite a bit weaker than Rage so it seems reasonable to me in an offensive-oriented secondary. You only get the large bonus when surrounded so in an AV fight or something you lose most of the benefit.

It would be interesting for someone more math-inclined than I am to run a comparison between AaO's extra damage and the damage provided by the various damage auras. I suspect Blazing Aura would actually add more total damage than Against All Odds in many situations provided you don't use Shield Charge.

Actually, you did state that in the quote I made above. Also, I did look through his posts in the thread and nowhere does the word Rikti or Pylon appear. He quotes Bill Z talking about getting 200 dps out of Claws (an acknowledged high-dps set) while others in the community can hit 300 with other Primaries paired with Shields. I expect he does exactly know how AAO works as well:...

It doesn't need mentioning; AAO will be maxed out whether it's from ten Rikti monkeys or ten generic mobs from any spawn that a Shielder jumped into. Which is why the attempts in this thread to caveat the performance and tie it *only* to Pylons are silly. But it is your claim that Castle looked only at a specific case (Pylons) and made "sweeping generalizations" (when he literally has said no such thing) that is ridiculous. At best you could say that after looking at whether Shields could be the culprit he used deductive reasoning based on incorrect assumptions and came to a resulting faulty conclusion: Shield's AoE is not unusually large (wrong) and AAO's 81.3% "isn't that large" enough to account for a full half-again more DPS on top of Base + Dam Enh + Build UP/Soul Drain - therefore something odd must be going on in DM and Fire to account for the rest. You yourself stated that AAO alone can only account for a ~1/3 increase, so if the rest is not coming from Shields then strange performance seems to be coming out of the Primaries.

But even in that best case for your argument, Castle also said there might be factors in the "specific builds" that he'd have to investigate further to know for certain. It was only after that when people began discussing specifics about -Res procs involved and such.

If the problem is in one of two places and it's not in location A, it is most likely in location B. (It's a nice touch to put in the "and may still be!" bit at the end to try and keep people scared though.) No misunderstanding of the mechanics from the guy in charge of "the whole shebang". No rush to judgment. He did have incorrect information about what Shield Charge was doing in-game versus what the internal documents said it was doing, and he very professionally came out and admitted as much right here.


But don't let me detract from your narrative when you're trying to publicly get your self-righteous on.

my namesake was a ma/sr from june 22, 04..and i had flurry because i wanted superspeed. you can see why i can be snarky when people complain about sets becoming "unplayable", im really not a mean guy, i just have a different perspective

No, it wouldn't be worth the even more cry's later.

To which Castle said:
His post was filled with misinformation and incorrect "beliefs" about the causation of the perceived issue. And appeared to be formed on a laughably insignificant sample. Which I (not you btw, just thought I'd point that out) and others quickly tried to correct. No point in him taxing his efforts in an area that has nothing to do with the issue.

If he truely believes that a persistent 81% damage buff isn't "that large" then I fundamentally disagree. Maybe you agree with him I dunno, I'm guessing yes cause you are picking this nit silly.

As mention the cause of the discrepancy isn't fire or DM because if you enabled shields for all primaries you'd see claws, db and kat right up there too. But now I'm just repeating myself and getting pulled into a position of similar contribution that you have made to the discussion - none.

FWIW an approximately 35% increase is all AAO is contributing on those high end builds (the rest is fire's innate higher damage and near perma souldrain for DM, procs and likely better attack chain optimization), but you'd know that if you knew what you were talking about rather than just trying to prove some pointless point that only you seem to be intent on making.

Indeed. It seems you are correct in assuming shutting off conversations and spreading misinformation about your favorite OPed sets being weaker than they actually are might really prevent the devs from finding out about the imbalances for a while.

Carry on with your anti-nerf shouting, I guess. Won't stop me from expressing my opinion on balance whenever I feel like it.

The Nit I'm picking is you twisting what he's said in this thread so you can cluck your tongue about how dumb he obviously is. I don't have an investment in a shielder so I didn't weigh in before now, but it really ****** me off when someone tries to mock a guy for something he didn't do in order to make them self feel important; especially when that guy has already gone out of his way for them.

Earlier in this thread, you were precise and analytical...right up until you started shading Castle's words. That means you don't have an excuse for it.


My god, what a burden it must be to have your massive and incisive intellect weighed down with the need to correct the vacuous stupidities of the lesser mortals you are shackled with.

Or maybe you just read his post wrong :P.

You've chosen to interpret his statement in a way that let you tell yourself how much smarter you are than this "dumb guy", rather than what was written there.

Is 81% damage buff significant relative to other damage buffs in the game? Yes it is. It's about the size of Rage. Is it "that large" that it could account for half-again more dps? No, that would be somewhere around 115% and further north from there depending on what the Primary's +Dam tool is. 81% is less than that so no, it is literally not large enough to completely account for the difference, as Castle said. It "isn't that large", not large enough.

Castle never said that 81% was tiny, which is what you want to stuff into his mouth because it's patently absurd.

Try to read his post while pretending he's at least as smart as you and see if it makes sense.


Great. Finally. Congratulations. You've just recapitulated exactly what Castle said in the block you quoted and I linked to. Go read it and see!

But you can't admit that's what the man actually said, because then you wouldn't have ground to stand on when you try to color him incompetent. What good would that interpretation be to you? It certainly wouldn't be any fun.

Indeed, at this point if you admitted that you'd have to acknowledge you made an error instead of sneering at a guy who's taken time out of a deadline-approaching schedule to actively look in on matters that are important to you.


Having been roundly shamed by my lack of "contribution" to this thread as you colored it above, (you're right, I didn't sniff at the man when you did) I'll slink away now and let you get back to the important business of personally keeping the game from running aground through the demonstrated ignorance of the Development staff.

Dude, you haven't posted anything in this topic before a red name popped up. My money's on you only being here through the dev digest too, I don't really recall that many of your posts in the scrapper forum. Your credibility as a completely neutral bystander interested in contributing to the conversation who happens to genuinely "defend" the devs is hovering around 0.

Personally, I have faith in the devs. Sort of. Maybe "had" now ? Yeah, because no matter how you sugarcoat it, that post of Castle was completely unscientific - picking one example that isn't even true to start with, simply because it's from someone famous, and jumping to conclusions without fact-checking everything.

You can run that post of his through the fanboy glasses all you want - I'll lend you my pair, it served me well during all these months when I thought balance was done carefully and not by some guys doing "fixes" drastically changing powers by a factor of 100% while the main power guy isn't informed ; it's still worrying. I'm not saying Castle is dumb or anything, of course there's much more than Shield he has to worry about, but it's still a worrying mistake because this specific post was wrong on several levels.

It's not like Frosticus was alone in interpretating Castle's post the way he did, so there's either some miscommunication or maybe, just maybe, Castle might have made a mistake in this post (and really the answer to that question was about 4 pages ago - when it's not "omg you're pro-nerf" blocking the discussion, it has to be "omg you're anti-dev"... Sigh.)

In MMO history, every time this has been tried it's been a disaster. MMO balancing is not science, it's an art and there will be peaks and valleys. That means nerfs, then buffs, then nerfs, etc... It's the only way to ensure that we don't get to a point of instant kills on the offensive side and invincibility on the defensive side. And considering we can get darn close to that now in this game, I think it's pretty clear that we are SUPER.

Seriously, even if Castle took Shield Charge out of the game and replaced it with a power that summons a portable generator to charge your shield's batteries, the set would still be remarkably powerful.


As for what to do with Shield Charge, I say leave the small radius damage alone and go ahead and lower the splash damage. That's fair. If the power is doing to much damage it's doing to much. Sure that doesn't stop the power from being great against a single (or few) target(s) because of it's super DPA, but I don't think the powers team should butcher the power when it seems to be doing fine in most situations (otherwise, why would it take a post like this for Castle to check his work).

Has anyone ever told you that you talk way above the norm for a video game? I understood what you said but seriously?

While I agreed with her point, Arcana like to beat down folks with her intellect. Especially, when like here, you push one of her pet peeve buttons. It's one of the reasons, I'm still not sold on the idea that she is a she. Typically only us guys have such a (just or unjust) high opinion of ourselves.

EG, one day you'll grow up enough to realize just how ******* ignorant this post was.

I guess but it comes off as having to prove that I am smarter than you rather than you know being humble about how smart you are?

I can agree with the bolded statement

Dude. How many chicks do you actually know? I have no idea what Arcana's gender is, but I'm with Bill. The above is dumb.

But look at the builds it is not just an 81% damage buff my IO build adds another 20+% to that 81% so I am hitting a 100% damage buff and I am sure I am not the only one

I tested the pylons both saturated and non saturated I can hit 190-195 dps with solid global recharge on my build when I fully saturate I was hitting the 230-235 range so i think it is more than just the 80% it is the extra ontop of that from the builds

What REALLY sucks is that you'll change it a year or 2 from now and we'll all be like "why?" and you'll all be like "it was overpowered".