Arcanaville

That wasn't the problem. The problem is that ironically, when you give people the freedom to choose anything, they will gravitate to the best combination of choices. Archetypes are one way to in effect say you can have this, but then you can't have that. Open this door, that one closes.

When you don't do that, and you don't have an extremely solid power tree system, you end up with what CO ended up with at launch. Everyone becomes ranged scrappers. Why take melee attacks over ranged attacks when the only difference is range? Why take anything but a defensive passive when staying alive is the most important thing in combat? Once you have a full attack chain, why not take the strongest controls and heals you can get?

They have slowly taken steps to improve that situation over time, but I don't think they've fully addressed it.

I didn't say Nova, I said "conventional crashing nukes with damage equal to Nova." Which are Blackstar, Nova, Psychic Wail, and Dreadful Wail. I also meant Atomic Blast, but that was before I realized that power is bugged. Its apparently dealing some of its PvP damage in PvE.


If you're hitting resistance debuffed and damaged *minions* then I can't think of any situation that's going to come up often where I24 three-wave nukes will fail to defeat them equally well. The thing to keep in mind is that I24 three-wave nukes will hit for 4.0 in I24, whereas now they sometimes hit for 3, sometimes hit for 4.5, and sometimes hit for 6. You are getting more reliable damage, and it will sometimes be better than now. The majority of the time it will either be better or just fractionally worse. Scale 0.5 is less than the damage of Neutrino Bolt.

That was my thinking, since the Discworld Death seems to be a comparable entity to the DC Endless Death. That would make Azrael the Death of all Deaths.

Depending on how you define "more powerful" nothing can destroy Azrael in the Discworld multiverse because in effect all agents of destruction work for him. Not only are all Deaths servants to him, even the Auditors of existence seem to be at least subservient to him and have no power over him. Since Azrael is the ultimate destroyer of everything and nothing can destroy him in any realm of existence, that's one definition of most powerful.

Shadey specifically mentioned melee smashing attacks, which it will defend against without qualification.

Moreso than Warshades are now? I've thought about the slot cost problem myself for a year or six, and I think its an acceptable performance shift for the general case. I'm not unconcerned about the min/max case, but I'm far less concerned than I am about the general case.

Then that's true.


For the reasons you describe.

Inferno is a bit tricky because of the DoT, but assuming I24 Inferno has the same DoT, at the damage cap a Corruptor should have a guaranteed kill on minions and Lts in both I23 and I24. Neither can one-shot a boss, so I24 Inferno will be about 11.6% lower than I23 Inferno on average (its not 18% like Nova because I'm assuming constant DoT for both versions).

I'm also assuming all the DoT ticks land, but its cancel on miss so it will average slightly less (each tick as 99% chance to hit, but a single miss causes all the remaining ticks to fail).

By average damage, I24 Inferno should deal about 3.2% less damage than I23 Inferno for corruptors at the damage cap.


... You actually find damage-capped Inferno to be a bit weak?

Right at the damage cap for even con at level 50, I24 Nova ties I23 in terms of being a guaranteed kill, but deals less damage than average on Lts and Bosses by the normal 18%. Averaged across a spawn, that means I24 Defender Nova at the damage cap will deal about 9.9% less damage than I23 Nova, still below 10% gap.

The only significant difference besides that: a damage capped I23 Nova has a 37.5% chance of just barely killing an LT. I24 Nova will have no such chance. So today, about one in three Lts at even con at level 50 die to Nova. In I24, they'll be one or two hits from dying.

I didn't know there'd be a test on Friday.

There's too many variables to give an accurate answer to that question, but a couple of points worth mentioning:

I24 Nova slotted and stacking BU and Aim deals about 429.4 damage to a +4 minion. That's a hair *less* than necessary to defeat them, so unless you pop some reds or have lingering Defiance buffs from the previous fight, or have better than +95% damage in Nova from invention slotting and invention set bonuses you'll have a ton of minions scattered all over the place with a sliver of health left. Even with broken ragdoll, that's probably not a good thing. Fortunately you only need about a percent more damage buff. Unfortunately that does not count any resistances the critters might have, and that's highly variable, particularly because Nova deals partial smashing damage.

So shoehorning pop culture into easily definable laws is silly, because its more properly shoehorned into internet lists.

Addressing this point separately, Electric blast hasn't always been perceived as "functionally inefficient and less attractive." But tell me: if electric has been ignored specifically all these years, then which blaster primaries and secondaries haven't been ignored?

Electric hasn't been singled out: Blasters and Blaster sets have, until recently. A fact I've been mentioning off and on and more or less continuously since the beginning of the year when I said I would make it a priority to bug the devs about Blasters until they got serious attention. I think I24 is a pretty good start. Does it fix everything? I'm not even sure its supposed to "fix" *anything*. Rather, its supposed to make snipes more attractive, its supposed to normalize blaster range, and its supposed to make nukes functional in continuous combat. It fixes those powers globally, but that may not "fix" any one particular set specifically, for some definition of broken.

But while the devs are in fact paying attention to Blasters, and to ranged sets in general, there's going to be more opportunities to get things fixed. My original point still stands: you can get frustrated and give up, or you can be in it for the long haul. The opportunity has arisen to reexamine and address many blaster issues directly or indirectly. Its still going to be a process, that process will occur over time, and their priorities won't necessarily be yours. You might think Electric Blast is the most needy powerset demanding attention. Maybe it is. Maybe its not. Honestly, at this point among Blaster primaries it would probably get my vote, primarily in terms of addressing drain mechanics. But you can work within the system available to get them the attention they generally deserve, or you can spend time wondering why the devs don't see the game exactly like you do.

I assume that's a rhetorical question, but I'll answer it anyway. First, no change benefits everyone perfectly equally. So if you want to attack the ranged set changes as being imbalanced because they don't instantly rebalance every set they touch in the manner you want, you're simply asking too much from a set of cross-powerset changes.

Second, its easy to characterize changes. You characterize the ranged changes as being highly disadvantageous to Electric Blast compared to other ranged sets. You even mention Energy Blast. Here's an alternate take on that comparison:

1. Power Burst is an attack I don't even take, because its DPA is only trivially higher than Power Blast and Power Blast can be used while mezzed. Increasing its range has extremely limited benefit unless you're taking the power already.

2. I might take the power anyway if I didn't have an ultrahigh recharge build, so theoretically speaking the average player would find significant benefit from that. Except those players now have a much better alternative: they can take snipe. In most cases, playing Energy/Anything will be able to have fast snipe a very high percentage of the time if they take tactics and Kismet. And the snipe doesn't have to be perma fast to be better than Power Burst.

3. So both Electric and Energy get the same fast snipe benefit. Energy gets an extra benefit of having an attack that is questionable to take except as a filler have longer range. At best, that's a trivial benefit compared to the fast snipe.

4. Both get non-crashing nukes in I24. Energy will get the faster recharging one, but Electric is effectively getting a massive ranged AoE that doesn't crash. Even accounting for the slightly longer recharge, that's a significantly better benefit. Electric also now has a much more effective drain to stack with other Electric drains and can do so at range. Nova's knockback might be effective, but it requires exposing yourself to point blank range for its cast time.

Arguably, at worst the two sets are benefiting roughly the same: energy is getting a dubious attack slightly better, while electric is getting a better nuke improved. On top of that the devs have said they were also looking at making other improvements to Electric, such as to Voltaic Sentinel.


The truth is that both are getting the same snipe benefit, both are getting an analogous nuke benefit, and energy is getting a range-equalization change that electric doesn't need. Anything else is spin.

It prevents us from becoming CO at launch. In other words, broken.

Fully acknowledging the technical issues, I think this is one of Paragon's more short-sighted errors. It may even be the short sighted development error.

Its possible, but I wouldn't assume this is likely. People are comparing these effects to things like controller AoE holds, but that's not a valid comparison. Those AoE mezzes are very long duration in part because they are one power among many mezzes in control sets. The control in the nukes is just one control, and under *normal* slotting it will be up only about once every minute or so. A more reasonable question to ask is how do nukes compare to other powersets that have exceptional tier 9s. Those would be:

1. Defensive overdrives; i.e. Elude
2. Controller/Dominator pets
3. Buff/Debuff tier 9s (aka: Heat Loss, Fulcrum Shift)

Is Atomic Blast an exceptional power when you put it in the same bag with Elude, Fulcrum Shift, and Fire Imps? In my opinion, its not.

This question is likely to be more relevant, because it cuts to the question of just how powerful should ranged attack sets be, and what's the ceiling on their most powerful attack. Compared to the set of all buff/debuff tier 9s, defensive tier 9s, and control set pets, Atomic Blast doesn't actually seem all that exceptional to me personally.

Lets compare the mez in Atomic Blast to the mez in another Defender tier 9: EMP. Atomic Blast has an unslottable 15s mag 3 hold. EMP has a slottable 22 second mag 3 hold with a 50% chance to hold mag 4. Even when you factor in the longer recharge for EMP than I24 Atomic Blast, EMP has a much stronger hold with much higher aggregate uptime.

The devs may decide the point to the mezzes and debuffs was to offset the crash, and without the crash those secondary effects are now too high. But I don't see a specific reason why that is a mandatory decision.

I have no plans to do that. If it goes anywhere, probably explosive blast. That's assuming I want to burn a slot for it, and my preliminary I24 build has no such slots available.

With Nova no longer crashing, if I figure out a way to free a slot to put into Nova, its almost certainly going to be recharge. Being able to use it more often beats having dead bodies better organized any day of the week.

(Beard not optional if keeper is female)

That's a very good question. I would say most people are extremely passionate about their homes not exploding.


I don't know if its necessary for success, but its extremely useful when it comes to the question of not jumping out of windows before that success is achieved.

I recognize the devs take a lot of flak for everything. I'm on record as saying if Paragon Studios was a person I would not let it balance my checkbook, and when it carries the two it should use both hands, and I'm probably the powers team's biggest supporter. If I'm joking about Positron dressing up as a decimal point on Halloween to scare the design team, I can only imagine what the rest of the feedback sounds like.

But just as I want design sanity from the data team, I want holistic consistency from the writing team. And we both know that the problem isn't the skills of the writers or the impracticality of managing lore. Its priority. Its a priority, or its not a priority, and its not a priority. So long as its not, I'm going to be extremely critical that its not.

I actually don't think the writers are morons or incompetent. That's the problem. I know you could do it if it was mandatory to do it, and the resources to do it were made available to you. I'm not one to expend energy asking for impossible things. Consistency doesn't require unpredictable creative sparks, and its not a very subjective thing that could be radically misjudged. It just requires a lot of validation work. It requires someone to be the keeper of continuity, or alternatively for everyone to be.

Once several years back he was absolutely positive I was on drugs.

If we're talking about Defender nukes specifically, and we're talking about the conventional crashing nukes with damage equal to Nova, Nova only *reliably* kills even con minions at level 50 with 397% damage strength, which is essentially the damage cap for Defenders.

Also, where are you getting this 30% number from? I24 nova-like nukes are going to *average* doing about 18% less damage. That's on average. 50% of the time (because Nova has bonus damage that doesn't always trigger) it will do 11% less. 37.5% of the time it will do 33% less. 12.5% of the time it will do 33% *more* damage.

Its even con. At +2, I24 BU would average 18% lower at base, 11.4% lower slotted, 9.6% lower slotted and with BU, and 7.2% lower slotted and with BU and Aim.

Are you suggesting that the endurance costs of those toggles are an equal constraint on offensive output, or are you attempting to contradict the original premise that endurance costs of defensive toggles are immaterial to offensive output by pointing out everyone has defensive toggle endurance costs?

I'm beginning to wonder if nukes are so infrequently used almost no one actually remembers what they actually do anymore.

Arbiter Hawk likes to do things the hard way, but he's also a munchkin so I'm sure he'll come around eventually.

It should test knowledge that is less personal to writers, like their names or how many fingers they possess.