Enhancement Proc Changes

My main is a Grav/Kin controller swimming in global recharge, for the following two reasons: one, Gravity has weak AOE control and getting Wormhole and Gravity Distortion Field back up ASAP is pretty essential to his performance; two, he goes through endurance fast and relies on Transference to finish fights. He frequently approaches 200% recharge even solo, and easily passes it on teams where someone else is also buffing. His go-to power for damage is Crushing Field, which is five-slotted with procs. Going back to my previous note on Gravity's weak AOE control, one of the procs is a crafted Gravitational Anchor hold proc that helps cover that hole - sure, it's not his primary form of preventing attacks coming in, but even with softcapped smashing and lethal defense he's still a squishy controller and can't afford a drop in his ability to stop enemies from attacking him. I'm going to have to rethink his entire playstyle if this goes through.

Worse, my Ill/Rad with perma-PA regularly runs around with 230% recharge. She has the Contagious Confusion proc in Deceive... which already ends up recharging well before I intend to use it again, considering the other powers she's always firing off. Just how worthless is that purple set I spent hundreds of millions of inf on going to become for me?

[QUOTE=Grey Pilgrim;4219261]However, the old system was a lot more clear and easy to follow. PPM and how it is described with procs is terribly done and confusing, and not all entirely because of the language associated with them. "Procs 20 or 30% of the time" is a lot easier to grasp than all the formulating going behind this change. I suppose it's inevitable to balance how differently recharged things are, but I guess I didn't have an issue with procs going more in low recharge powers and less in long recharge ones.[quote]

It's a fair complaint. But it seems like it's a case of not being able to have something both ways. Either there'll be some math to even out proc rates, or there'll be flat rates that leave some things overpowered and some things underpowered. Even so, the general range proc rates will fall in with this setup is fairly predictable, so I don't think it should be too onerous once everything gets cleaned up. (Although it'd be a really good idea to be able to check what the rate would be before slotting a proc in a power. It'd be even better to be able to do so without having bought a proc yet.)

(UberGuy posted graphs.)

I'm not quite sure what that has to do with the implied question in my post though. I can calculate proc rates easily enough, but that really doesn't answer the question of "Is this too powerful?" If your second graph is supposed to relate to that... well, I'm really not sure how to interpret it at all. (And I'm also not sure it'd relate all that well to AoE powers, which are the ones I care about.)

*Feels like she's had parts of this conversation before.*

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreadShinobi Thing is it is /not/ necessarily increasing the rate you can attack or the amount of DPS you deal. Since we're using FM as an example I'll just stick with that, in a Cremate>Incin>GFS you need 88, 146, and 237% rchg respectively for each of those powers. So for GFS, being the highest recharge requirement you will probably have 89% rchg from enhancements and 70% from hasten, meaning you need 78% from global recharge (not factoring in need for permahasten). If you have 78% global recharge+70% from hasten, that means you already have enough recharge for Cremate and Incinerate without slotting ANY recharge in those powers. Meaning if you do slot any recharge in Cremate or Incinerate (which you likely will for set bonuses) then you WILL BE HURTING YOUR DPS.

I can't help but notice that even so, if I assume 89% recharge in Cremate and Incinerate, they'll still have a better proc rate under this system than the flat rate procs.

That being said, I agree that this is a strange effect that it'd probably be better *not* to have, particularly for the way it encourages very strange slotting decisions. But there's no way I can think of for the system to tell "useful" and "not useful" recharge apart... and I don't think "don't change the system at all" is too likely.

-Morgan.

Well, there's no one answer to whether the PPM procs are more powerful than standard ones. The only way to answer that is on a per-power basis, and the critical factor for a power when you look at it is the cycle time. So you need something like my graph to get a sense of how much more often a PPM proc will activate than a flat-rate one. That answer is directly related to how much more powerful (or not) the PPM ones are. I don't see how the graphs don't pretty directly answer the question.

Similarly, we can't give a generic answer for AoEs. They have to be considered on a case-by-case basis. However, given the single-target percent chance, the AoE scale factor is just a divisor, so you can calculate the "base" proc chance and then divide it by the AoE factor to get the result. In general, though, the PPMs are going to do well, because AoEs tend to have large recharge times compared to single-target attacks, which is what the AoE factor tries to offset.

It is true, I think, that recharge would reduce the effective value of a PPM proc under the new regime, or rather, its relative value.

Say I have a power with 10 second recharge, and a proc that is tuned for 2PPM. That's about a 33% proc chance. Say the power does 100 damage and the proc does 50 damage; the net bonus of the proc is roughly a 16% damage increase, which isn't great unless I'm already at the ED cap. Now I get a bunch of recharge, reducing the power to 5 seconds. The proc chance drops to about 16% and the net bonus to about 8%. The amount of damage I do from the base power roughly doubles, proc damage stays the same, so the proc is about half as useful.

So this does mean that PPM procs are more (relatively) valuable the less recharge you have. This fails to bother me because nothing said their relative value had to be fixed, and PPM is a basically better design than flat chance-to-proc.

There is a HUGE problem for PvP.

The PPM does not factor DR.

PPM goes off the recharge slotted in the power, but DR only affects the total of my recharge.

That means that if I have 100% slotting in my power, PPM mechanics treat it like the power recharges 100% faster, when in truth that 100% recharge is DRed to 83%.

Whatever you decide the balance to be in PvE, it will be -underpreforming- in PvP because of this. That is not good, that means either PvP is balanced with procs or PvE is.

It is completely impossible to balance both the PvP and PvE procs because they're based on a number we have -before- DR hits us. Meaning PPM is treating us as if we're at full power when we're not.

PPM will -not- work in the current PvP setting. This is definitely a nerf to procs, or at least it will always underpreform to it's PvE countepart.

I "would" suggest that the devs make procs use the normal % method we've been using for years, but that won't solve the problem. It would make problems worse since people with PvE builds going into PvP will be even -further- from a PvP build. It would mean builds -must- be PvP spec'd, because yet another mechanic is changed from PvE to PvP. It would create more confusion and make PvP die more.

You can't return the procs to %s for that reason, and you can't implement the PPM system because it won't fit with DR.

Hell, this is really really reallllllllly going to hurt PvP. Procs are extremely important because they are unresisted damage, and with DR taking away a ton of +dmg, unresisted extra damage is the only way we can kill each other.

The only solution to this problem is to get rid of DR, so that PPM work in PvE and PvP exactly the same.

I don't expect this to happen though. More likely, PvP will get hit again.

I know the devs expressed how they needed to test a PvP environment without DR and TS and didn't want to just flip the switches, but it's either taking a chance or wrecking the current PvP system.

Turn off DR before the ship sinks.

Finished.

While I can't give the full details or slotting (I'm a PvPer, and giving out my build is handing people my weakness and strengths on a piece of paper), the calculations were fairly simple.

The normal Apoc/Glad Jav Flares, Glad Jav in Fire Blast, and ATO proc/Glad Jav in Blaze on a Fire blaster gives +48 unresisted DPS. This was with the %s we have now.

Unforuntately, the ATO proc has a +rech component, meaning slotting it makes all the procs go off less often in that power. The next best DPS I could get was +41.4 DPS, that means it's a 7 DPS drop, which is a lot when you consider it's unresisted. For that reason, it's DPS drop is doubled (Typical resistance is 40% - 50%, and +dmg is DRed) compared to normal 200+ DPS builds. PvP numbers don't go that high. This DPS change is more like a 8% drop rather than the <4% drop if we were in DPS numbers of 200+.

Not only that, but like I stated up above, Blaze is close range and a player won't actually get it off that often. Using my more realistic chain above, the DPS goes from

41 DPS --> 30.5 DPS

All of the unresisted damage is stuck in Blaze, and even though it goes off more often in that power, the power itself is used -once- for every 3 flares in practice.

This is really bad. PvP is a lot different than PvE. Everyone survives by chaining powers, much like how regens do in PvE. If I drop 10% in damage, it means some people will be able to chain their Rebirth/Hiber/Hoarfrost + other powers that couldn't before. In a match with the current system, I could kill them 10 seconds before their Hiber was back and win. In the new system, that 10% drop in damage would mean they could make it into Hiber, and that's enough time for Rebirth, which stalls enough to make it to Hoarfost and the chain never ends. This is how all Ranged -and- Melee PvP is. Constant DPS to burn through everything the person has and kill them in the biggest space in their survivability chain. Nothing like PvE.

This is why Regen brutes with Recon/DP/IH/MoG/Barrier/Demonic/Burnout are near impossible to kill. The biggest pause they have in survivability comes after 20 minutes of full DPS, I've tested it against many brutes.

I don't believe Soul Touch was 100% sure the procs were getting nerfed, because even I wasn't, but he was correct about it. With PPM not factoring DR, with the biggest load of unresisted damage in a power you can't always use (limited range) and not even being able to use sets in the powers now (no more glad jav bonuses, they have +rech in 4/6 of their IOs), this is a massive nerf to procs for fire, which is very popular.

I don't expect any powersets will do more damage with the current formula for the PPM procs or the way they calculate their % chance. This is going to globally lower the damage of PvPers, unless the procs are buffed to the point where they're extremely overpowered in PvE and overcome the % procs used in PvP currently. I doubt that.

It's possible they might be able to make them count DR'd values when in PvP zones. It would probably still reduce damage, but less, if they could do that.

Edit: