Energy Transfer

ET was nerfed to hell because its DPA was off the charts. That's it. Nothing else.

Why anyone thinks the old ET was fine for a brute but would suddenly be omgwtfbbq broken on a scrapper when the crit could have easily been removed from the power prior to proliferation is beyond me.

Edit: Also, why did you bring up PvP to me? Where did I mention it?

Oh goody, edits to respond to.

So ET got nerfed because of EM proliferation to scrappers, right? Where's the proliferation? If that was Castle's reason to nerf it why don't scrappers have EM? Why bother doing it when he did if his only reason for doing it was due to future proliferation?

Brutes can't solo AVs? Yes, they can, and do regularly. They can also get softcapped.

I'll respond to you in whatever way I see fit whenever I see fit to do so. The reasoning behind your belief is not sound. We all know how slow the devs are to make heavy changes. This is no different than any other change made that took forever to put in place. ET's DPA was always out of whack. If it hadn't been, no change would have occurred.

Here's the facts:

Castle decided ET needing nerfing for the game as it exists today. Today, scrappers don't have EM. They don't matter.

Castle decided that the fix for ET was to increase its cast time, thus reducing its DPA.

Several of you state that EM wasn't overpowered in PvE. The facts disagree with you. PF, you stated that Castle must have known about the changes he was going to put into place for PvP when he was making the PvE change. I agree with that assessment. This means that there was no PvP reason for the ET nerf as ET would have been nerfed under the current PvP rules anyway.

This means that there was a PvE reason and one that existed for tanks, brutes and stalkers. Due to the "fix" being an increase in cast time, the PvE DPA of the attack was the problem.

It ain't rocket surgery.

Yes, ETs DPS was always out of wack. But the entire set depended on that particular power in order to keep a decent DPS. As you know Bill, by nerfing that one power it dropped EMs DPS considerably.

Look, I'm not part of some tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theory. I'm not and do not ascribe any type of sinister motivations to Castle or to his actions. ET needed to be nerfed, you and I both know this. I just think that prior to IOs and power proliferation Castle didn't see it as it important or game-breaking.

I think that the devs probably thought EM was fine for PvE. Sure ETs DPA was out of line, but EM paid for it by having almost no AoE ability. And as we've seen, in PvE AoE is king.

Now maybe PvP factored into it, and maybe not. The timing of the PvP changes makes me think that it probably didn't have much to do with it.

But then along came IOs and Super Scrappers soloing everything in the game. EBs, AVs, Rikti Pylons, Monsters, GMs, God, etc. Castle knew that EM was going to get ported to Scrappers. It's my belief that's what made Castle finally decide that he had to nerf ET. I'm guessing that EM probably hasn't been ported yet because the devs have been busy doing other stuff - like Going Rogue.

Sure Brutes can solo AVs, but because of the Brute AT damage base, neither Build Up nor Against All Odds has the huge effect for Brutes that it does for Scrappers. Also, believe it or not, some people had a hard time (even before the changes) keeping the Fury bar filled. With Scrappers that's simply not an issue. They do full damage 100% of the time!

I read and posted in more than one thread back then about the ET nerf. I remember Castle saying that it was being nerfed because its DPS was too high. I'm not disputing that. What I do dispute is the opinion, that seems to be held by many people, that it was nerfed because of PvP. The timing of the PvP changes, which Castle had to have been aware of when he nerfed ET, just makes it seem very unlikely to me.

So we're both in agreement that ETs DPS was out of wack and that PvP had probably somewhere between very little and nothing to do with why ET was nerfed. So this just leaves us with two questions.

1) The Timing - Why did Castle choose to nerf ET at that particular moment in time?

2) The Method - Why did Castle nerf ET in that specific manner?


So here's how my brain arrived at my conclusion to this.

1) He had the time. This was probably the biggest factor. Castle happened to have the time at that particular moment and he probably knew that he wasn't likely to have much free time in the future. But then that brings up the next question: Why did Castle choose to spend his time at that particular moment on ET instead of any of a dozen other things?

2) Why didn't Castle simply go into the chart and change some numbers? Recharge and/or damage? That's what they did when they nerfed Ignite. Why did he bring Back Alley Brawler into it and change the animation time? Something that's (to my knowledge, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) only been done once before, with Flares. And with Flares we know that the animation was changed only because they were standardizing all of the Blaster Tier 1 and 2 attacks. Unlike the other animations, where BaB was just able to shave a bit of time off of the animations here and there, they simply couldn't do it with the old Flares animation.

So why didn't they do it that way with ET? Why did Castle choose the one route that most certainly took the most time and effort? And also just happened to be the one way that players couldn't do anything about with IOs?


So that's why I believe that Scrappers are the reason that Castle nerfed ET. Scrappers base damage modifier, the timing of the change, and the manner in which he changed it. You may not agree with me, but at least you can't honestly say that I haven't arrived by my belief in a logical manner.