Frosticus

Castle has already commented specifically on AAO. He doesn't feel an 81.3% persistent damage buff is "very large".

Taking a look it appears to be the second largest perma damage buff available in the game behind fulcrum shift on just SO's. Under high recharge things like soul drain and double rage surpass it. At any rate it is right up there in the top handful of what is available to us.

As for SC it is imbalancing the set, Castle has already supplied the numbers on it and earlier in the thread I supplied numbers on it vs some common comparables like blazing aura+burn. It is currently a lot better than anything else.

As for a pvp build you are going to want in excess of 40pts of kb protection and some for of perception+phase (ie phase+focus acc or tactics+hibernate)

Was going off the post that followed the build post that said.

"and 6 slotted Numinas in Life Drain." It sounded like an amendment to the posted build and one you believed to be an improvment, hence the update.

If that isn't part of your build then I'm lost as to why you posted it. If you previously had HO's in the power and took it upon yourself to switch it to numi's you should reverse that decision.

I've already said this at least five or six times and it seems to be to the agreement of most poster that FA is due for some buffs and SC is due for a reduction. Strapping a nuke onto the back of FA to bring it up to the level Shield is operating at just creates two sets that are strongly overperforming.

I've even listed my suggestions for fixing FA in this very thread as have many others. I'm not sure if you are deliberately ignoring things already discussed for the purpose of building a baseless argument, or if you have genuinely forgotten what has already transpired.
Actually no. I've never seen anything short of a crash based blaster tier 9 wipe spawns as quickly as a single scrapper SC does. Fire/kins, spines/da, mm's they are all very high damage, but it is always high dot, not instantaneously rendered damage. Big difference.

SC has a very rapid cast time and applies the damage instantaneously. None of the combos you just cited as supporting evidence can do anything like that.

I'm sure this would have relevance if it was being discussed.

Honestly if you haven't learned in life that perception is the only thing that matters then the lesson is overdue. What I'm saying is that SC is almost as visually pronounced as nova. It is impossible to miss and the whole team knows that you just rocked the entire game in one shot. Everything bounces up in the air and then falls down. Most of them never get up. SC is so visual it makes it "the scrapper show". The show headline just happens to be "Don't worry guys I got this and it will only take 1.716 seconds too!".

Rain of Arrows is not a headline stealer and it actually takes well over 4 seconds to cast with damage execution closer to 6 seconds.It is also subject to issues such as mobs running out of the aoe before the damage is applied and drawing agro while locked in to a very long animation. While the damage from SC is hitting the spawn at about 2.5 seconds. That is a big difference. The difference means that everyone can get a few attacks off before RoA hits. The result may be massive overkill, but everyone has a chance to participate and contribute. At the end of the day everyone is paying to play the game, not watch, but actually participate.

SC on the other hand is one of the faster cast times in the game attached to an AT that fears very little so doesn't need to hesitate to pull the trigger. It is resolved so fast that the spawn can actually be dead before the fireball that a ranged toon cast reaches them. Again big difference.

*What's really sad is that the best analog to SC, a power found in a defensive set, is a blaster tier 9. If that isn't a clear and decisive indication that something is amiss then I'm afraid nothing will.

For the most part the discussion has been rational. We've had a few posts from people who haven't read the thread and have just jumped in due to the dev tracker and we seem to have recovered from Castle's initial folly. Overall not a bad thread with a lot of content being discussed I know there is a tendency to let a few bad apples (from either side) ruin things, but from the looks of it we are resisting pretty well (which is a challenge for me, I like getting riled up lol).

I'm very confident the reason you state for the delay is accurate. The problem it is going to create though is that the fallout of when the power is reworked is going to be massive. Probably one of the bigger blowouts we've seen since the AE exploits. Anyone that isn't aware of this thread is going to be hit by a Mack Truck of change and it is going to happen far enough down the road that everyone will have settled in to how the set operates.

There is a fix that can go in immediately (or close to it) and that is to revert it back to how it used to be for everyone (the value brutes still adhere to). We know that the reworked version is likely going to be at about that power level or a bit less. Hit it now while the power is still "young" and then hit it much more softly with a mechanical reworking later down the road to closer follow the vision Castle has for it. Honestly that's the only way I can readily think of that will diffuse most of this bomb. It is still going to explode, that is inevitable, but the difference could be a hand grenade vs a snuke in the snizz (if you watch southpark you'll know how deadly that could be lol).

Anyway, the drama is going to be epic if he sits on this for many months. Maybe he doesn't care as he feels that drama is going to happen either way, may as well just deal with it all at once much later down the road. Who knows.

Don't be greedy. Share your toys.

IMO and of course YMMV with this one: I just ran a dark/traps up to 24 last month and was really underwhelmed with it. It showed signs of being very survivable of course. Very survivable even when being debuffed. But the damage was really lackluster. I think that in actual gameplay dark scourges way less than the other sets due to almost everything being dot (much of it slow ticks to). It means each follow up attack is rolling the scourge attack at a higher hp than it would if the damage was all front loaded.

If I were going to try the combo again I'd flip it to the defender version for the much higher values on everything. I know on my cold/dark I didn't go in with the expectation of very high damage so what it produced always felt satisfactory. So in contrast to the corruptor for whom I believe I set my expectations too high.

I'd roll it as a traps/dark/dark with oppressive gloom and soul drain, which would be considerably tougher than the corr version and probably do as much or more damage in the final build (def soul drain is way better than corr version). Prior to that of course the corr is going to deal a bit more damage, but like I said ime the damage was pretty low so for me at least I was just focusing on the final product rather than the slight difference getting there.

As a reference
Corr gloom with 3 SO's, assault, and acid mortar
=184.9
w/ scourge = I dunno, like I said I feel dark scourges less efficiently than the other corr primaries I've tried (fire, ice, rad, energy, sonic).

Def gloom with 3 SO's, assault and acid mortar
=196.3

Either way, it isn't going to be much of a damage difference. But the survivability difference will be huge. And from an endgame point of view the corr will probably want scorp shield to aid in defense, whereas the def can softcap easily and pickup a res shield and more importantly pick up soul drain. Which may very well translate into being more survivable and dealing more damage in nearly every situation. But again, the latter part is a narrow portion of the play experience.

Excellent. This is my number one choice of additional powers to the game even before any new sets. So if it comes down the line reasonably soon I'll be pretty happy.

I'll take a stab at this one and why SC bothers me even though I have two Shield toons (dm/shield brute, and bs/shield scrap).

I support the nerf to SC for several reasons.
1. It was never implemented as it was designed by Castle. No idea why that happened, or why it went live like that, but it did. As a result it is considerably better than L-rod in every way which is a no-no because it is a secondary power and L-rod is a primary power.

2. By comparison it makes my Fire armor toons feel inadequate. Yes they are jealous of Shield users, my own included. Teams throw around a lot of defense buffs, which benefit my mildly build shielder more than my FA and because Shield's offense scales better to team buffs (particularly recharge) than fire's offensive powers the disparity becomes larger and larger.

3. My blasters feel invalidated by Shield Charge. The current values of scrapper SC blow every blaster nuke out of the water with the exception of Rain of Arrows. I don't have a single blaster (other than arch) that wouldn't happily trade its t9 for SC. In fact the first time I used SC I said to myself "this is a blaster power" because of the huge radius, higher than any other scrapper power target cap and spammability of the power.

4. I think they are trivializing team content too much. It is sort of "oh watch the shielder decimate entire spawns while we follow and pocket buff him". It detracts from the "fun" and contribution that other toons are there to make. An arch blaster can do similar but at least they usually need heavy support, a shielder with even a little bit of buffing gains "enough" survivability to basically become a tankmage. Additionally, while an arch blaster can wipe entire spawns it is much more subtle, SC is front and center and kabooms the entire screen. Like many things in this game the tangibility of the power plays are large part in how it is perceived.

5. My position on the timing of this nerf and the progression of mistakes that have put us in this situation have been documented in previous posts. Suffice to say, it isn't positive. In fact, I think it should be hotfixed down to the original 133 damage value immediately. At which point if Castle frees up some spare time many months down the road like he said he can rework the power to how it is "intended" to be. That way the reworking won't be nearly as harsh and the current issue of it being ridiculously OP'd is placated.

True. And I don't think anyone is suggesting otherwise, not even the person you quoted. Then again this game isn't really like any other game now is it? This game is promoted as super casual, which shifts the definition of "putting serious effort..." down quite a few notches from how it is typically perceived.

$100M might be "serious effort" to a lot of people. Changes that alter that investment can be fairly devastating to that player because for them the game is really loose and they probably won't understand why they are being shifted, just that they are being shifted and their hard work has been (at worst) invalidated.

On a similar but different tangent, top level powergamers (as you are defining them) will just adjust and move on to the next phase of power gaming. It is the late adopters that strive to achieve what the bleeding edge min-maxers pump out in no time that end up being hurt the most. They get cut off at the knees because changes always seem to take 2 years+ to happen at which point even the tortoise has leveled it up and pimped it out if they were attracted to the powers in question. At which point the powergamers have already busted through the ceiling with the next combo and the slow adopters start chasing them all over again...just to get cut down when they finally achieve it.

All legitimate reasons aside these fixes just come too slow. No one in their right mind is asking for perfection, or even rapid attention to issues as desirable as the latter would be. But the speed they are happening now is just too slow.

This thread is a perfect example. Castle has become aware that SC is retardedly overpowered. But we won't be getting a fix for months and months and months (maybe a year or more). There are a ton of valid reasons on why the fix will take so long too, but that still doesn't make the delay acceptable. A system that takes year(s) to fix an identified problem (that they have the tech to solve) is not a very good system.

I have no delusions about magical speed/efficiency increases happening overnight, so a bandaid solution is to implement weekly GMotD that informs players of known issues. SC is now a known issue and anyone playing, or about to be playing the set has a right to know about it.

The AV version was a pushover for my fire/traps corr, but I'll have to check cause he actually did a number to my stone/ela brute the first time I faced him (only EB version too). I recall him sapping me dry which simply shouldn't happen on that toon. I'm thinking his drain might be unresistable. Then again, I wasn't really paying attention so I may have had ninja run on or something and drained myself lol.

If by "spike like cov" you mean move the population in an upward direction for a short period of time, then yes I agree. If you mean "spike like cov" in terms of size then I think you are dreaming and hopefully no one running the show is banking on that either.

I don't believe this involves skill in the manner that you mean it. If domination was short duration with short recharge that you could tap into for brief periods (think control version of MoG) it would be skill based.

As it stands now you can do what you suggest, but it means sitting on domination until that crucial point. That is probably fine, it just means you are operating at less efficiency than you could be the rest of the time. And no amount of player skill is going to make domination be up for the next crucial moment if it occurs after the 90 seconds but before the 200 second recharge.

Like a lot of dom players it makes more sense to just remove that entire aspect from the equation and build for perma dom. I don't think anyone will ever say that perma dom isn't extremely powerful. Whether it is more powerful than a similar controller with hasten+75% global rech is debatable; depends on specific pairings.

*It looks like you are referencing the old numbers for doms. New numbers are 52.8 base damage for powers like dominate.

I have no qualms about sharing builds as I'm sure most will attest to. Being adept in Mid's is not something I feel is worth lording over people. I also strongly believe in personal growth (in all aspects of life). If someone wants me to share my knowledge with them I am more than happy to, but I can tell the difference between genuine interest and when someone is simply being patronizing.

Is there any particular reason I should take time out my life to prove something to you that I already know when you have no intention of using that knowledge for personal improvement? It really sounds like a waste of time to me because your opinion is meaningless to me and you have just revealed that you will never use the knowledge as you are exclusively Villain AT's and have zero interest in the controller AT.

At this point I'm curious as to why you would even enter into a discussion that you admittedly know nothing about 50% of. This means that any information I send you will need a full written explanation of why it is superior which means even more of my time spent on something you will not take any useful information away from. How is that any different than me just repeatedly hitting my head against the wall? It would be about as beneficial from what I can tell.

This really should have stopped with me stating that I have no interest in educating people that don't want to learn. You just publicly stated you have no interest in expanding your knowledge base. Seriously why is this conversation even happening?

Considered a success for DDO? sure.
F2P can work though, the success or failure of DDO isn't the determinant of that revenue model.

The thing to walk away with is the knowledge that when survival (and the various definitions of it) is on the line innovation goes into overdrive.

The fact that they were able to reverse the direction the game was going in (whether permanent or otherwise) is a huge credit to the company. Trend alteration is exceptionally difficult as anyone in marketing will tell you.

Copying someone that started charging for an auxiliary service is great and all, but it is the people that push to carve out survival where survival seemed impossible that truly advance systems.

As fair as it is to say that a F2P+ model needs to prove itself for that particular game it is also fair to say that a straight subscription model is no longer as effective for the industry as a whole as it once was.

Put into another light: If AE had been a raving success and the next step in innovation of MMO's like it was heralded to be, then you would have seen more companies trying to copy it. The fact that by all quantitative standards it has been a complete bomb probably means we won't see other companies spending such considerable resources on similar systems for awhile.