Twilight_Snow

The energy aura thread is getting too long, it is very hard to find information for both the dev and the players. In addition, many suggestions are in fact similar in nature to each other. There were several attempts to collect all the suggestions in the past. Here, a concise summary of the suggestions to energy aura will be presented, which can give readers a quick grasp of all the ideas in a glance. Thank you all for the dedication and passion to energy aura.

A. Changes to the basic nature of powers

<ul type="square">[*]1. Change the damage-typed defense to positional defense[*]2. Replacing a power

There are suggestions to:

1. Merge the two passive resistance powers into one
2. Remove dampening field(the resistance is usually suggested to be kept in the replacing power)
3. Remove conserve power
4. Remove energy cloak

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New suggested powers to replace the removed power(suggestions are usually a subset of the list below):

1. Click or Aura
   
   The suggestions can be divided into the following categoriesadd taunt when appropriate)
   - dull-pain/reconstruction-like: +regen, heal, +max HP
   - siphon-like: +recharge, +damage, +to-hit, +def and their corresponding debuffs to the mobs
   - power-boost-like: +damage, +to-hit, +def
   - invincibility-like: +regen, +def, +res
   - mini god-mode(+res)
2. Passive: +max HP, +regen, +def
3. Defense or resistance toggle

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B. Thematic improvements
<ul type="square">[*] 1. Self soft-cap energy defense[*] 2. Higher energy resistance[*] 3. Generalized energy drain

Instead of merely draining endurance, the following additional effects have been suggested:
+regen, +recovery, +dam, +speed, +recharge, +max HP, heal, +def and +res with or without corresponding debuffs on the mobs, and taunt should be added
Basically, the suggested effects are very similar to those in the previous section, but without the need to replace an existing power.[*] 4. Add slow resist, -movement resist(-jump, -fly), detention resist to kinetic shield[*] 5. Add end drain resistance, -recovery resistance to energy protection or power shield[*] 6. Add +perception and -perception protection to energy cloak[*] 7. Additional status effect protection to overload[*] 8. For powers that grant defense debuff resistance, defense enhancement should increase the resistance [*] 9. Increase defense debuff resistance to SR level[/list]
C. Overall defense/resistance increase and holes patching
<ul type="square">[*]1. Higher defense and/or add resistance to the power set as a whole or to specific powers[*]2. Add psionic defense to entropy shield and overload[*]3. Add toxic resistance[*]4. SR-like scaling for resistance(resistance increases with decreasing hitpoints)[*]5. SR-like scaling for defense(defense increases with decreasing hitpoints)[/list]
D. Out-of-the-box suggestions
<ul type="square">[*]1. Damage reflection shield(reflect damage back to the attacker)[*]2. Damage absorption(transform incoming damage to healing for a small duration with long recharge)[*]3. Defense cosmic-balance(defenses increases with the number of team mates)[*]4. Reverse telekinesis with appropriate debuffs[*]5. Phase-shift-like power[/list]
"Suggestions" for suggesting fixes:
<ul type="square">[*]1. A brute should not soft-cap defense just by energy aura alone, except energy defense.[*]2. Soft-capping several defense should not be trivial

It is supposed to be difficult to soft cap defense. It can be achieved by multiple power pools and multiple IO bonus, or with the help from team mates. Suggestions to energy aura that can soft cap several types of defense by just taking combat jumping, for example, should be avoided.[*]3. Recognize the theme of the set

It is usually harder to suggest changes to a power set by means of balance with other power sets. If there are abilities that fit the theme of energy aura but not in the set, then it is easier to argue that they should be added when appropriate. On the other hand, the theme of a power set may also suggest certain weakness. It is the best if players can appreciate the strength and accept the weakness of the power set.[*]4. "Cottage" rule

Castle wrote this on another post about changing powers.
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Seriously, it *is* a good policy -- it provides structure within which to do things. Without structure, there's chaos. How would you like it if tomorrow you logged in and, say, Build Up now built a small cottage at your chosen location, instead of adding to your damage? It's a silly example, admittedly, but it's to prevent such wholesale changes from happening. I *could* overturn it, in specific cases, if it were truly needed, but in the case being discussed here, it is not truly needed. There are MANY options that have been discussed that do not involve changing the core use of the power.


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In the general case, the issue is that it suggests the problem is simply that tohit buffs are too strong, and the problem would be solved by simply making them weaker (at least in PvP, and perhaps in other situations as well). But its a more complex problem than that, in that the effects of tohit buffs are different for people with different levels of defense. This gets to the root of the problem, which is the intent of having defense, or tohit buffs. The intent does not seem to be for tohit buffs to have such strong effects on defense, and in the way it does across the different levels of defense you can have, in all cases (probably in most cases). But its not easy to make up equations where tohit buffs automagically scale themselves to reasonable values for all levels of defense, and in all situations (some of which may suggest doing nothing at all).


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From the current ingame formula, defense and to-hit buff are on the same footing. So, at least in terms of formula, there is no bias against defense or to-hit. In this game, buffs(in particular buffs from another person) are intended to be strong, so as to enhance teaming. In principle, if your opponent gets to-hit buffs, it's supposed that you should get defense buffs from outside to counter it. If a person has low defense, it should be overwhelmed.

So, on paper, the current implementation of defense ingame is ok. I think it is the game content that has an overall bias against defense. As you mentioned, to-hit buffs are higher in numbers and there are more to-hit buffs around. I also want to mention that people feel that resistance is better off because there are less resistance debuff in pve(we're getting more, for example in CoV). Unresistable damage is not really in pve, I think, and unresistable damage is the to-hit counterpart for resistance. All these make people feel that defense is worse off, but you can see that these things are not intrinsic to the defense-to-hit formula itself.

In my opinion, a "true" fix is to fix the ingame content itself(for pve). I admit that it will be a daunting task to tweak the whole game. Your proposed fix is a bit ad-hoc in my opinion, but I guess it doesn't really matter how it is fixed as long as it is fixed. Since your fix is to reduce the effect of to-hit, you're indirectly letting the game content and powers to continue the design imbalance.

The new scheme looks nice and probably can solve the problem.

Maybe, thematically, there is still something to be improved. The to-hit buff is related to the attacker only. The mutiplicative anti-accuracy implies that the target somehow can reduce the to-hit buff of the attacker through defense. Since defense is not an offensive action, it might be a bit strange that it can "resist" to-hit buff of the attacker. For example, it is more natural for the target to resist defense debuff, because the defense debuff is applied to the target.

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Thats not how I see it defense represents awareness of an attack while to hit buffs are a way of making your attack harder to be known off, effectively negating defense. Anti-accuracy (or elusivety) would represent your skill at actually avoiding any attack by subconscious reflex, even if an attack was properly cloaked you would still be able to avoid it, although the chances of it hitting still increase, you are still proportionally likely to avoid it.


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In real life, if you ask me what is the difference between to-hit and accuracy, I probably don't know.

The concept of elusivity sounds good for SR, but may not fit quite well for ice armors for example, cause they are just a big chunk of ice. And maybe energy aura and bubbles as well, as they just deflect the attacks away.

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4) Change Force Bubble from a KB/KD/Repel aura to a -dam, -speed, -rech aura. Make them push their way through like their moving through jello and make their damage suffer for it. It's all win here.

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It's also completely changing the power. Please refer to the OP.

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Actually, to retain the original flavor of force bubble, the power just needs to do repel. I think it's fine to add whatever debuff as a secondary effect as long as it's not -tohit.

For the OP, actually we all know it implicitly, even Castle didn't say it out. Not only for FF improvement, all the other powerset improvement threads should make suggestions that doesn't involve deleting a power and replacing it with something else such that the suggestions can be more practical.

On the other hand, if we don't think outside of the box, I might not bother with the change though. For example, the changes suggested in this thead are sort of minor, I doubt that unpopular powers will become popular after the tweak.

I bet the dev realize the issue already, so the work is not wasted. Concerning whether and when the set will be fixed, it's not really something we can control.

Maybe, one thing you can do is to keep a record of the ice melee issue/suggestion list, and various arguments with those headache-inducing maths. When the forum purges old threads, you can re-post it such that the information will not be gone. And I'm sure that suggestions to buff ice melee will come up occassionally, it will be nice if we can always point people to your issue/suggestion list.

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Elec/energy and elec/elec: end drain
Elec/ice: holds, various controls and tricks(using sparkie)
archery/fire: aoe non-stop every group(not just a kaboom and left with no end like other primary sets)

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Nice guide actually. I'm also playing inv/ice tank, high lvl 40 already. I slot her mostly with non-rare IO set, with a couple unique or rare. It seems like rare salvage is a huge cost, and probably need to continue to work on influence for quite some time after lvl 50. Maybe you can make an "economy" set-IO build for the poor like me.

How much inf needed for the IOs?

Nice. But I would just put up the second graph, and say that the sweet spot is 40-60% health, instead of all the zen.

You probably have to calculate survivability to understand that. Since you're a math geek, you can do the math.

Suppose a toon has 2000 hp, each hit the mob makes is 1000, so 2 successful hits the toon will die. If you calculate the probability of the toon still surviving after ten attempts, you'll find that adding 5% defense to a 35% defense toon helps a lot more than adding 5% to a 0% defense toon.