Starsman

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To be honest they should have given us fire. That would have worked out better than this so long as we keep fire sword circle and get rid of scorch.

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You realize if they did this they would get rid of Fire Sword Circle and leave you only with Breath of Fire for AoE, right? By default, PBAoEs are the first thing to be removed from Stalker ports.

It likely wont crit, just like Shield Charge does not crit.

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No, now people wont have to spam for fillers or HAVE to make an 8 man team. Hopefully, the amount of spamming will subside.

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People don't spam to get a large team going to farm, they spam to get a large team going to carry their hand into a farm.

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LOL You can keep me on your ignorez

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Nah, I must find a new use for my ignore list... it was exclusively a "filler request blacklist".

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Enhanced Difficulty Options - Players can now fine-tune their difficulty levels by telling the game exactly how they want to be treated. They can choose to be regarded as a specific size team (even if they are soloing), and even have control over the level they are detected to be when it comes to the dynamic spawn system. So if you ever wanted to see if your Scrapper could take on a map that is populated for an 8 person team, four levels higher than your own, now you can! The difficulty settings of the mission owner dictate how the mission is handled, just as before, and you can change your difficulty settings at any Hero Corp.'s Representative in Paragon City or Fateweaver in the Rogue Isles.

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DO NOT CHANGE THIS I WILL RESUB FOR LIFE. 3 accounts.
Seriously. I LOVE THIS.

I WILL NEVER ASK PEOPLE TO FILL EVER EVER AGAIN.

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So I can finally take you off my global ignore?

That being told, lets see how long it takes from the release of I16 to everyone saying "my set sucks because it can't solo +4, 8 man missions!!! All casual players should be able to do this!!!"


I also wait to see the teams that say "sorry, all 3 of us can handle this 8 man team, we not full but you will just steal or expee"

EM and SS are two of the problem sets in this game. If you been paying attention to the stuff they proliferating, they are not proliferating the big problem sets, at least not yet.

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I so fear you're right.

Must I forever be denied Scrapper Footstomp?

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What makes you think proliferation of Super Strength would give that to you? Rage will surely be drastically different on a scrapper SS.

Foot Stomp's increased radius may be adjusted for scrappers.

And in the end, the base damage Foot Stomp does is less than Fire Sword Circle, that you already have access to.

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Why do you keep posting that?

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Because its funnnneeeeiiiii!!!!!

And if I turn to be right I get the Forum Fortune Teller badge!

That being told, you can be sure: Martial Arts alternate animations WILL be punches and arm based, for all those players that for years have complained about MA being just kicks.

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Electric Melee and Armor for Issue 16.

I think Castle is just scared. I was really hoping for Energy Melee/Energy Aura. Or SS and Mace/Axe. Or Ice/Ice. Sigh...

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But didnt you know that Martial Arts will use Super Strenght Animations as alternates? There is your Super Strength!

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Doubt it.

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But what if there is no car around? Should I dig a car out of the office floor?

I hope they dish out Conserve Power from the set and replace it with a click heal or click regen buff, call it Re-charge or something.

As for Power Surge, Tier 9s in general (other than shields and willpower) need attention so I would not single that one out.

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Just as long as I can make Punch look like an actual punch and not a weapon attack animation with the weapon removed, I'll be happy.

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I always thought Super Strength was around before the weapons. I must be wrong.

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Punch uses the same animation that certain powers in Mace, Axe, and Broadsword use. Only difference is that you're not holding a weapon, so it instead looks like this awkward, one-handed smash.

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Or those weapon waves look like acquired inertia-less swings. I personally think most of the weapon attacks are the ones looking awkward.

People people, you dont get it!!!

Martial arts get ONE alternative....
Super Strenght gets ONE alternative...

People been wanting to punch with scrappers for a long time.
People been wanting to be sleeker with tankers for a long time.

Result: Super Strength gets to use Martial Arts animations and Martial Arts gets to use Super Strength Animations

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That just goes to show you the potency of def stacking. Sets lacking any form of +def really get cheated in the IO game. (The counter view being that def sets have it too good with IOs.)


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Thing that angers me is the lack of Resist set bonuses. They are too few and too fragmented, only Psi seems to be offered in large amounts.

I can see the devs saying its more dangerous to give a blaster resistance than defense, since the blaster gets no defense debuff resistance, after all but resist would make the blaster resist -resist but then again: blasters have a much lower resist cap than defense cap making the danger of resist capping much lesser than defense stacking for anyone but tanks and brutes. And these tanks and brutes (and scrappers and stalkers) that already have native defense also tend to resist defense debuffs making defense IOs insanely powerful for them....

...anyways babbling too much: Devs: Give us decent Resistance bonuses already!!!!

Scrapper AAO also gives a much stronger damage buff than the tanker version.

Both versions of Shield Charge do the same damage and ignore AT modifiers.

It's not too much work to do that, it's a lot of work to maintain it, though. The way I have this setup, if I change a formula I have to go to every document and change it.

If I make another variation of all charts with AAO, that automatically doubles how many documents I must update (already got 4 just with scrappers and tankers, once I'm done and put up doms and brutes I'll be at 8, and 6 of those would need AAO duplicates.

I can do a quicky but just as a oneshot that I would not maintain and would definitively delete within a few days.

Edit: also, would only show two scales: 1 foe and 16 foes (due to caps that would technically be 10 foes.)

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To Sarrate: I think it took like, what, I4-ish, for the devs to even get a clue about DPA? So of course you're right, ET was never balanced around DPA in concept, but in reality, it may as well have been. The normalized numbers seem harsh though--I knew it enjoyed a good 50% or better DPE discount, but I'd hate to pay full price for the damage. Maybe just cut down on the incoming damage by 1/2?


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I would say it was not until perhaps Issue 8 and im guessing. The sets created during CoV were definitively not balanced around DPA. Actually, I think the first set to ever be balanced with DPA in mind was Dual Blades.

The players may had started to think about actual DPA around I4, though. Perhaps select players earlier.

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Corrected an issue with my charts, I was overstating Stone Melee's performance (rounded that set to whole numbers instead of 1 decimal place.)

It now ties up with Energy and Fire in ST damage, no longer that high up.

The problem was only in the 50% charts.

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What's the best DPS chain for EM now?

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Air Superiority - Air Superiority - Air Superiority

Repeat as needed.

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On a serious note, ET and TF are still the best powers on the set but many hate the lengthy animations. If you want to avoid them like the plague, then you are stuck with
Bone Smasher > Energy Punch > Barrage (priority order not a chain)

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Note also that there have been many inexperienced players claiming the set has higher performance than scrappers because one attack would hit harder than Beheader, ignoring entirely recharge cycle, cast times and plenty of other things filling the overall chain.

Many players still just judge powers based on how much damage they do per click, not per cast time. Some of the ones that actually calculate the cast time still today insist to ignore recharge time.

Right now, even my calculator lists Stone Melee with a 2.00 score on single target damage.

The weakest scrapper is spines with a 1.8 ST score.

So we have that current Stone Melee can match low end scrapper dps (high end tank with just SOs vs Low end scrapper with just SOs)

To make things interesting, though, Stone melee has a 3.2 endurance efficiency score and Spiness gets a 1.6, this means the tanker consumes twice as much endurance to sustain comparable damage, off course Spines is that low due to DoT bonuses, normal scrappers tend to gravitate towards 2.3 in the worst case. (Higher number means more endurance used per second after enhancements)

Here is the thing about EMs ST issues: they can only be fixes by:

Altering animations
Increasing recharge time of attacks.
Adding a new power

Altering Animations wont happen for many reasons, from people complaining from their feel changing (again) to Posi not giving time for BaBs to do another animation just to fix a balance issue.

Increasing recharge time will just mess up things further for fluidity. I was not much in favor of the Barrage "buff" as it was.

Adding a new power, off course, can't happen but we can turn Stun into one. It would end with a 16s recharge timer. DPS wise, it would even be better than ET and TF, those would be good due to their bursting nature. I got to say I sort of like the idea of an ET with splash damage.

I can see many high level builds just removing ET in favor of the improved Stun, while others will still prefer the increased ET burst.

I theoretically can do it via a bit of tweaking and playing with the rules, but I would not be able to give players the choice to see it. It would have to be a whole new spreadsheet stuck with that. I personally would like to avoid that because then I have to please every primary/secondary combination, and I'm not touching Fiery Embrace on this thing. Different scalar for different damage types... can't handle that right now.

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Would giving Stun the "Clobber Treatment" really help, though? It helped Mace because Mace didn't have hard enough ST damage. The same cannot be said for EM at all, I would say. If you up Stun's damage, you lose the utility of the power (remember how much the stun in Clobber was scaled back when it was given damage), and you're simply given yet another ST power to choose from.

If anything is done to EM, it would make a lot more sense to adjust one of the other attacks. Making ET more like Thunderstrike is interesting, upping Whirling Hand's damage a tad, etc. would make more sense. Or just tweaking the damage up a little bit for ST damage in the set (by adjusting one of the current damage powers) is the way to go, I would say.

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Stun is barely taken. Total Focus makes it redundant, same recharge and actually does damage even if it's slower cast.

Giving Stun the clobber treatment would actually boost damage in many builds that take it even if they use ET and/or TF.

Benefits from giving it the clobber treatment:

<ul type="square">[*]EM gains a great dps attack that has no extreme cast time, allowing for more fluid attack chains.[*]EM gains access to what the set is all about since earlier: heavy hitting attacks. Else the set is forced to wait to the Tier 8 and 9. [*]It allows players to entirely ignore EM and ET without gimping themselves dps wise. Slow as they may be, those two attacks are still needed for the best DPS the set can dish and not taking them is a self-nerf. Stun would allow the set to remain as competitive as now without them, and raise above the rest with them in high recharge situations.[*]Even if the stun is made shorter, it would still be 100% chance and it would allow for reliable Stun&gt;TotalFocus chains that quickly hold bosses without sacrificing damage.[/list]
Given the few players that actually take Stun, I think these are all great tradoffs for a bit of stunning in a set with so many stuns.

Now, as far as other attacks go, I would buff the Whirling Hands somehow. Given the damage formula, its underperforming. It should do 1.18 ds of damage instead of 1.0 It also costs more end than it should, 1.56 too much. Note that increasing it's radius to 10ft would also bring it into balance according to the formula, but I personally rather it did more damage than making it reach further away.

OK, I THINK I fixed it. Fighting between yawns and dog so not sure. Would welcome a second set of eyes looking at the numbers and telling me if it looks right.