Do you think they will end up making Tier 9 Armor powers crashless too?

I want to be sure people understand, I want the crash. I mean that. I want Unstoppable to crash and I want it to be significant. I prefer the current Unstoppable with a crash to an Unstoppable without a crash even if they do not lower the benefits.

I would not mind if the crash was moderated a bit, but if they totally take the teeth out of it, I will be sad.

Similarly Warkupo, I prefer to use I/Os to build more solid layers rather than depend on a "miracle" button with a probable death at the end. Then 1 purp and 1 orange of any size (almost always available) gives me the minute I need to tear into the largest mobs no problemo. If they changed the Tier 9 into ANYthing else I would consider it an improvement, it is that bad to me. Literally, if you got a Dev as drunk as they ever been, and they come up with any idea ANY i would accept that as a better solution to the power than it is now. THe power is stupid. I am used to sets having powers I do not like and avoid. However, for a tier 9 defining power of the set to be this nasty is really poor. Some people, like Samuel Tow, will love it. Some people love jumping off building and opening a chute with inches to spare. I feel the Devs back in the day really missed the mark on this, but they were writing for a different game too, and hindsight is 20/20. I would love to see the data on who takes these powers and uses them. I would lay out $50.00 it ain't very many.

Personally I want the crashes as well. Because I think the crashes create a conceptual opportunity to do something unique with the crashing overdrives.

I've been thinking about overdrives ever since Synapse suggested that crashing nukes might get looked at all those months ago. The problem with crashing nukes is that they leave the blaster basically offense-less and defenseless, at a time when the presumption is that there were lots of things around and some might still be kicking. There's nothing in the nuke mechanics that let blasters take steps to mitigate the crash: they have to engage lives targets to make the nuke worthwhile, but they have no means of reacting to any target that survives, at least not without resorting to workarounds for the crash itself, which is probably not directly intended (meaning: the crash probably isn't intended to be an inspiration depleter per se).

Overdrive crashes are different. Overdrives last for a long time, and the presumption is that you have time while being much stronger than normal to dispatch any threat to you before the crash occurs. Its a sort of bargain between the game and the player: I will give you three minutes of near-indestructibility, if you promise to use it to deal with what's in front of you and not keep going indefinitely because otherwise the crash will probably kill you.

The problem with the crashing overdrives in principle is that while they give you time to deal with problems, they don't give you the ability to deal with those problems. They don't improve your ability to defeat things in general. Also, the time period is long enough to try to give you a lot of latitude to deal with very strong threats, but its an awkward amount of time. What do you do if you kill off the spawn you're in within 90 seconds. Stand around for 90 seconds until the crash? Dive into the next spawn and pray?

There's one obvious way to deal with the time issue. Make overdrives expiring toggles so the player can choose when to expire and crash the power. But I find that to be a bit ugly. Its mechanically useful, but deciding to crash yourself seems ... icky.

Another possibility is to consider making the power stronger the closer it gets to expiration. The logic behind that is that since the last 90 seconds will be stronger than the first 90 seconds, you're more likely to not guess wrong if you try to take on one more spawn. The power will always be a little better than you might guess. By the time you get to having only 20 seconds left, its much more obvious that you should start looking for cover. When there's only ten seconds to go it should be really obvious if you can't kill it now, you should bug out.

I was thinking about Unstoppable specifically. Suppose that for the first 90 seconds Unstoppable did just what it does now. But then for the second 90 seconds it started to get an escalating set of buffs, that went something like this:

90s mark: +25% damage
135s mark: +50% damage, +10% tohit, +25% Res(end, rech, tohit, def, runspeed)
160s mark: +75% damage, +15% tohit, +50% Res(end, rech, tohit, def, runspeed)
165s mark: +75% damage, +15% tohit, +60% Res(end, rech, tohit, def, runspeed)
170s mark: +100% damage, +20% tohit, +70% Res(end, rech, tohit, def, runspeed)
175s mark: +100% damage, +25% tohit, +80% Res(end, rech, tohit, def, runspeed)

As you got closer to expiration, Unstoppable would make you more, well, unstoppable. Your damage would go up, your tohit would go up, and you'd start resisting debuffs increasingly more. That might be worth a crash, and moreover it would partially solve the problem of the power having "bad" duration: you would rarely stand around for 90s, because the last 90s should be enough to take on that next spawn. The power will try very hard to finish whatever you start, unless you're foolish enough to dive into a new spawn with only fifteen seconds left on the clock. There could also be some visual indicator to show you're reaching each mark, so you would have a better idea how quickly the crash was approaching instead of having to stare at the buff bar.

We could use different effects designed to be conceptually tied to the powerset in question. If the above is intended to align with the concept of unstoppable, I might consider something like this for Elude:

90s mark: +25% damage, +50% acc
135s mark: +50% damage, +750% acc, +25% Rech, +50% recovery
160s mark: +75% damage, +100% acc, +50% Rech, +100% recovery
165s mark: +75% damage, +100% acc, +50% Rech, +150% recovery, Instant Recharge(Primary)
170s mark: +100% damage, +250% acc, +70% Rech, +150% recovery, Instant Recharge(Primary)
175s mark: +100% damage, +500% acc, +70% Rech, +150% recovery, Instant Recharge(Primary)

I'm setting aside the soft cap issues with Elude for now. If the idea for Unstoppable is resisting debuffs, the idea for Elude might be speed which is the other thing associated with super reflexes besides defense, and I stuck in recovery to power faster recharging offense.

Similar things could be done with Power Surge and Overload. Those are sort of off the wall numbers, more to illustrate the point than offered as an explicit suggestion. But the idea is escalating ability to kill with higher offense and tohit, and an additional set of escalating benefits that are powerset-unique designed to make it both easier to fight and easier to disengage if you guess wrong and have to. Something that instead of having a flat three minutes of constant performance grants an ever increasingly potent benefit that makes the power seem to be more worthy of the eventual crash.

If it seems necessary to buff the defensive tier 9s with a crash, I love your idea, adding offense to the tier 9s seems a good idea. Most people seem to take and enjoy the tier 9s as they are, despite the presence of some who dislike them.

When I had my idea for a Storm Armor set, I designed the tier 9 as follows (this was pre-ED and I have learned a lot since then, but I still love the concept of a more offensive tier 9, (I think the damage number listed might be brawl index)):

Storm's Fury - (Toggle) You stand in the eye, channeling the fury of the storm. Channeling increases your hitpoint and endurance recovery while your foes are blasted by bolts of lightning. Channeling the Storm's Fury is very taxing and you will be drained of nearly all hitpoints and endurance, as well as be unable to regenerate or recover hitpoints and endurance for some time. +100% regen/+.32 end recovery, 0/sec cost, deals minor DoT Energy (.6111) in a 20' radius, will shut off automatically after 120 seconds, 880 second recharge, [heal, end recov, acc, dam, rec reduc]

Phil "Synapse" Zeleski breifly talked about this topic during the discussion about the upcoming changes to Ranged Blast Power Sets: City of Heroes Freedom Community Coffee Talk 7/11/2012 (around minute 39).

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.