Umbral

I'm guessing you completely glossed over the fact that part of the changes that would go along with the Rage revision would be a complete revisiting of the dam/rech/end of the existing SS attacks. I mentioned it rather explicitly so, please, read my posts before you start trying to comment on them.

You got the math wrong there. 63.17*1.5*2 = 189.51 (8.78 DPE). I'm just going to chock that up to a math error since you didn't make the mistake of assuming that the additional base damage that my version of Rage provides would be unaffected by +dam buffs. Of course, one thing you're completely ignoring is that you're comparing the SS attacks listed against other powers without taking into consideration a very important attribute: recharge. Sure, the damage-to-endurance ratio goes down (which is kind of the point, if you weren't paying attention), but the damage-to-recharge ratio goes up quite high.

Except that it doesn't. Reading comprehension ftw.

Maybe it's because you weren't actually paying attention, but I explicitly stated that the higher damage and endurance penalty only applies to SS attacks. Leaving Rage on while you're standing there with Blazing Aura would cost a whole .585 end/sec without any end redux slotted, which is exactly as much as it costs to leave Blazing Aura on while Combat Jumping is on, and it would provide a benefit because it's still providing +tohit to all of your powers, not just your SS powers.

Next time I make a suggestion, I hope you actually read it before you start trying to pull numbers out in order to criticize the suggestion.

KO Blow is a 20 second recharge attack with a 25 second recharge to make up for the fact that it provides you with a hold and knockup that has a longish animation that, while it is still nice, is still going to hurt its DPA a bit. Footstomp is amazing, but it's not good enough to bring the rest of the set up. Haymaker is roughly on par with other attacks (~46 DPA), but Punch is definitely sub par thanks to the longer-than-it-should-be-for-a-4-second-recharge animation time (30.6 DPA).

Try looking at the performance of SS without Rage. Sure, KO Blow and Footstomp are nice, but they're not nearly awesome enough to justify the utter atrociousness that fills the rest of the set. Rage is the only thing that really makes SS a set that doesn't simply suck (and it is so awesome that it catapults the entire set to top tier performance pretty much on its own).

Because Rage is so obscenely powerful that, in order to make a set with Rage that is also even remotely close to being balanced, you need to virtually castrate the rest of the set in order to stop Rage from making everything else completely borked. Without Rage, SS would be a joke of a set (look at how the set performs before level 28). Rage is simply so strong that you can't simply drop it into a set in place of BU (or any other BU variant) and expect it to remain balanced. No other sets are going to get Rage unless it gets a very hefty rebalancing then, and, even then, it's doubtful that other sets would get something akin to Rage because Rage is, where most people are concerned, SS's schtick. Giving other sets Rage would be like asking for other melee sets to be given combos like Dual Blades.

That's going to be a problem no matter what you do with the set. With my tweaks, it at least provides a substantive reason to have those largely redundant endurance effects when all players are getting Stamina as an inherent relatively soon. It also means that, even if those players have massively awesome endurance recovery, they're still going to be experiencing problems when facing end draining enemies because they'll be just barely capable of sustaining the endurance costs of a constantly on Rage.

(The actual workaround I would want for this would be for the toggle to have a limited duration that it is allowed to stay on, such as 90 seconds, to outright prevent people from building around leaving it on forever, but I know how unpopular those types of restrictions are for people so I made what I see to be a compromise by allowing it to stay on for a very long time but for the costs of leaving it on to be very high)

The changes would be to just tweak the dam/rech/end on the various attacks to make them actually viable attacks, along with some possible revision of secondary effects (such as making Hand Clap deal minor smashing damage while RageModeOn). Jab and Punch would likely be increased to 4 and 6 second recharge attacks, respectively, to give them actual viable DPAs. Haymaker would probably stay where it is. KO Blow would get its recharge reduced to 15 seconds or so, the damage would get brought down to a ~2.8 damage scale (from 3.56 damage scale currently), and the mez effects on the power would likely take a hit in effectiveness (either reduce the duration or provide them with a chance to occur). Hurl would probably get a 12 second recharge. Footstomp would either get an increase to endurance and recharge to account for its larger AoE (recharge increased to ~30 seconds and endurance increased to ~27 endurance) or it would get its radius reduced to 10'.

Because recharge, endurance, and damage are directly related when excluding bonus damage, the changes I would make to the set would simply act to increase the DPAs of the various attacks in the set and the endurance costs would be the same as accomplished by most other sets. So if my SS is doing the same non-Rage DPS as a set like Broadsword (which is where it would roughly lie, if I'm not completely off), it would have roughly the same endurance costs as the set to boot. With Rage turned on, the damage goes up substantially higher, but the endurance costs get substantially higher to boot, in exactly the way I described before.

I've got an entire write-up for some SS changes I'd like to see in the future, but my change to Rage really has to be the biggest one:

As I'd like to see it, Rage would be a toggle with a long recharge time (~90 secs) that provides a small +tohit buff(~7.5-10%) and activates RageModeOn for the character for a pittance of endurance (.065 end/sec cost for the toggle; the same as Combat Jumping). While RageModeOn, all Super Strength attacks the character uses would deal an additional 50% base damage and cost the character an additional 50% of the base endurance cost of the power as unresistable end drain. The end effect would be for the SS user to deal substantially more damage that is fully affected by all +dam buffs while having to pay a disproportionate cost for doing so (because the additional end cost wouldn't be reduced by end redux), which also means that Brutes would get the full effect of Rage rather than the diluted gains they currently achieve (because the comparative advantage of another 80% +dam when you're already packing ~250% isn't much compared to what you'd get if your baseline +dam were only ~100%).

For some numerical examples of how it would work, consider an arbitrary SS attack string that deals 50 DPS and costs 3 end/sec, unenhanced (16.67 DPE). With my variant of Rage toggled on, the attack string would deal 75 DPS and cost 4.5 end/sec (16.67 DPE). The dam/end ratio is perfectly preserved, though the end cost is quite a bit too high to be sustainable (even though the damage is high enough that you might kill your target before you notice you're about to run out of end). Now we assume that the player enhances it for 100% +dam and 50% end redux. With Rage toggled off, it deals 100 DPS and costs 2 end/sec (50 DPE). With Rage toggled on, it deals 150 DPS and costs 3.5 end/sec (42.86 DPE). The ratio skews downwards, meaning that, though you're dealing more damage, you're having to pay more endurance for that higher level of damage: you're getting 50% more damage, but you're paying 16.67% more endurance per point of damage spent for the privilege of doing so.

Now, the advantage is that you get to deal more damage virtually any time you want and it stacks with virtually everything. The disadvantage is that the additional damage you're getting is only as endurance efficient as it would be without any end redux in the power. The long recharge time on the toggle forces you to avoid toggle-dancing it and the higher cost causes the cost to go up as the performance you're getting goes up (meaning that it's incredibly difficult to simply build around the endurance cost as was possible with toggle-IH back in the day). It also has no crash so the only "crash" that occurs would be the endurance crash that happens normally when you run out of endurance.

When considering this, it's important to remember that, along with this change, I would also tweak the dam/rech/end on the SS attacks so that they actually have decent performance without needing to rely on Rage (just try looking at the numbers for Punch and Jab without laughing), so the set wouldn't really have the current justification for having a power that so thoroughly outclasses other powers within its same classification because the baseline powers of the set are so abysmal.

(as to the numbers, I'm not entirely set on them; the dam/rech/end ratio is relatively standard and I chose to provide an even trade off between endurance and damage in order to attempt to preserve that ratio; there might be some issue with not increasing recharge, but I see that as a viable trade off when you consider that endurance costs higher than endurance recovery capabilities are exponentially worse the higher they get above that point of equilibrium; with slotted Stamina, the amount of time that an individual would be able to fight with Rage on and off using the above arbitrary attack string would be ~50 seconds and ~193 seconds, respectively, assuming a 1.0 end/sec passive drain; the difference between those two numbers gives me some confidence that tweaking the ratio between damage and endurance costs wouldn't really be needed to account for a lack of increase to recharge costs)

He's talking about using the 3 slot strategy (Perf Shifter proc, Perf Shifter EndMod, common EndMod) rather than 3 slotting for Perf Shifter.

For me, I don't really see much point in going with more than 3 slots on Stamina or QR. My builds are generally tight enough on slots and easy enough on the blue bar that I generally pull out one or two slots from Stamina regardless.

That's not really cottage rule violation. Cottage rule only applies to changing the basic functionality of the power. The power would still be providing a defense buff to the team and not to yourself, so the Cottage Rule isn't invoked.

Redraw is why the set has a 1.1 accmod rather than the standard 1.0. A higher accmod isn't its schtick, so it doesn't have a 1.155 accmod like Arch does, but it's definitely better than the standard 1.05 accmod for other sets with redraw.

While I agree with you (Executioner's Shot needs some loving), you're not getting it right. With Incendiary Ammo, Executioner's Shot is actually your best attack thanks to the stronger secondary effects it gets (which means that you also can't really say that it doesn't have a useful secondary effect because it's whatever secondary effect your other attacks have, only better). Executioner's Shot is a go-to-attack, it's just not as go-to as other tier 3 blasts.

My personal solution to it was to give it the dam/rech/end for the standard Blaster Sniper attacks (of course, I also want to buff the Blaster sniper attacks up to the same level as the Dominator sniper attacks so that they're actually viable). The higher damage would make the DPA substantially better, the recharge and endurance changes wouldn't be substantially different for attack string requirements, and it doesn't involve the apparent hell of shortening animation times. The higher-than-normal damage for Sniper attack dam/rech/end can, balance wise, be pardoned by noting the ridiculously long animation time and the lack of a true Sniper attack's incredible range.

The lack of a snipe is, in all honesty, not something that the hurts the set. Sniper attacks have terrible DPA, are risky to use (i.e. if you get hit, you just wasted all that time for nothing), and are only really useful before you've actually started fighting (which means that they're only useful for a very slim percent of fights). If Blaster snipes were actually tweaked like Dominator snipes, the issue might be a bit different, but, as it stands, Blaster sniper attacks are less than useless

As I have been saying for a long time, the damage on the set is not weak. For most players, it's in the middle of the pack. With Incendiary Ammo, it's actually slightly ahead, especially if you value AoE damage capabilities higher (it's right up there with Archery, AR, and Fire where AoE damage is concerned). With Standard Ammo, it's slightly worse, but still viable. It's only when you switch to Chem and Cryo Ammo that the damage gets bad and that's because you're having to deal with a lack of +dam mechanisms combined with not getting the -res that makes Standard Ammo a viable competitor.

This is assuming that the power is flagged to have a 2.0 debuff modifier to its threat (most powers that debuff have a 2.0 debuff threat mod, but not all of them). We don't get to see that, so we can never be sure. Even more so, if you have an Invuln and a Shield going at a target with the same attacks in order to determine whether it does, you still wouldn't be able to get a fair assessment because Shield is going to be dealing more damage explicitly because it has more damage being thrown out. You could always attempt to give the Invuln the exact same amount of +dam or remove the commensurate amount of +dam from the Shield, but it starts getting fuzzy thanks to needing twice as much threat to pull hate off of a target and threat degradation numbers not being well known.

Of course, you could just say that AAO is stronger than Invinc simply because, even if it doesn't have a 2.0 debuff mod, it allows you to deal more damage while having, at the minimum, the same threat mods and thereby get more threat than Invinc does. That argument works just as well.

After looking at what Castle did to Cobra Strike, I think the likeliest buffs would be to simply increase stun chances a bit so that they're a bit more reliable. The durations aren't too bad compared to their base recharge times (well, except for Stun); the proc chances are just too low to be even remotely reliable. Stun could probably get some kind of change to make it an AoE control power of some kind (add a chance for splash control with no damage on enemies within 10'), though it could just as easily follow the Cobra Strike model and be turned into a control/damage fusion power (that pretty much means it'll be treated as a damage power with a decent control secondary effect).

Increasing AoE performance would be difficult without some fancy Cottage Rule avoidance within the set. Even if Whirling Hands had its recharge time lengthened, it wouldn't do much to make the set a better AoE performer. Giving Energy Transfer or Total Focus some AoE capability would be hard to justify without breaking the rule.

Don't we get one of these threads at least once every Issue?

Let me say this outright: DM is no less accurate than any of the other sets out there with baseline accuracy (every Scrap set except for Kat, BS, and MA). With the acc slotting you're saying you have, the only difference you would see between Dark Melee and the "more accurate" sets (Kat, BS, MA) would be a tiny difference when fighting +3s and higher.

I'm pretty much going to tell you that it's due to your own flawed perception rather than anything substantive. You're probably missing with Shadow Maul and seeing yourself whiff for a good 3 seconds straight (which is what it is designed to do because it only makes the tohit check once when it is activated) and then assuming that you're missing a lot. Conversely, you could just as well be assuming the set is less than accurate because it's not covered in AoEs, which provide a large smokescreen for misses.

It also doesn't allow Brutes to exceed Scrapper level damage.

Brutes have a damage cap of 775% (675% +dam) while Scrappers have a damage cap of 500% (400% +dam). Brutes have a damage scalar of .75 while Scrappers have a damage scalar of 1.125 and an inherent that provides them with an additional 7.5% damage on average.

Brutes: .75 * 7.75 = 5.8125
Scrappers: 1.125 * 1.075 * 5 = 6.046875

At their respective damage caps, Scrappers still deal more damage (and they get there with just ~300% outside +dam whereas Brutes require ~425%).

Under normal assumptions, they do roughly the same amount of damage: Brutes can push up above Scrapper level damage if they can maintain high enough Fury consistently, but they can also do less damage if they're not maintaining sufficient Fury over time. Of course, the Brute playstyle is also a more dangerous playstyle, hence the higher base survivability.

In the overall course of things, both ATs are excellent soloers and are going to achieve pretty much the same survivability and damage while soloing (survivability as a measure of risk:reward not incoming damage absorbed). On a team, the Scrapper is going to be doing more damage while the Brute is going to be harder to kill and providing some aggro management. There isn't really much legitimacy in saying that Brutes are better than Scrappers now that Brutes aren't dealing more damage than Scrappers at almost any point.

I know. It was actually a narrower cone back when the set was first being tested, if you can believe that, with higher AoE assumptions (more targets that could be hit, higher end cost).

The problem is that Piercing Rounds, if you assume it to be an ST attack with minor secondary target capabilities (which is largely what it is), it still looks really bad. It has twice the recharge as Executioner's Shot with double the recharge, lower damage, and 62% higher endurance costs. With those numbers, you would have to assume that it is either intended to be an AoE, a debuff power, or both. It's lackluster in the AoE department, thanks to high comparative costs for the number of targets it can hit, and the only time it's got a worthwhile debuff is when you're using Standard Ammo, so it just seems kind of off to me.

That's up for debate. Cryo ammo is certainly better than either Standard or Chem from a damage type perspective (which is the only real difference we're talking about here), but Toxic damage gets resisted incredibly heavily by many enemies in the game, even more than Lethal, much like Psi. It's not a damage type that players have much resistance to, but enemies have a bad habit of resisting it rather heavily.

For overall damage, I'd might place Cryo above Standard rounds, but at that point it's still an academic question: Incendiary Ammo trumps everything. Chem ammo is, definitely, however, at the bottom of the heap.

One of the things I wanted to happen from the very beginning was for Pistols to actually get the ammo effects attached to it, even it was weaker than it "should" have been. I understood why the devs would want the tier 1 attack to be weaker (fast animation time and low recharge time mean a very fast, low animation consumption cycle that could allow you to stack enormously well), but I still think that it should have had some secondary effect (4 secs of -dam, 2 possible ticks of DoT, 5 secs of -rech, 10% chance for KB).

Reducing the animation time of Executioner's Shot isn't likely to happen, seeing as that was one of the primary recommendations back in beta to make it a more viable attack and the devs didn't really pay attention to it (it would also mean more work for the already overworked BAB, which is probably why it was ignored). Increasing the range wouldn't do much to make the attack more useful either, except possibly for PvP.

The more viable option would be to simply increase the endurance and recharge on Executioner's Shot until the attack becomes a strong, viable alternative. A 14 second recharge would give the it a competitive DPA (67.0 compared to Pistols' 52.7 and Dual Wield's 44.7) and, because of the long animation time, the cycle time stays roughly the same.

That's also been something I've championed since we first saw the set. The fact that standard ammo is the only way to get the -res in Piercing Rounds (which is honestly one of the only reasons to use Piercing Rounds in the first place thanks to lackluster damage, effects, and AoE capability) always seemed kind of off to me, especially when I always got the feeling from the devs that they didn't want people Ammo dancing. Just doing that would go a similarly long way towards giving the set better ST performance.

Your deflection is amusing. Now can we get back to the debate at hand (whether */Regen is actually in need of debuff resists) or are you going to pull some ancient analysis from the depths of the forums yet again because you don't want to actually answer the questions I'm asking?

Standard actually does better damage than Chem or Cryo because of Piercing Rounds' -res effect which only applies while using standard ammo and not while using Chem or Cryo.

I wasn't a fan of Protean mainly because he was pretty much another AV/EB in the long line of AV/EBs that pretty much say "screw you melee!" For once, I'd like to see an AV/EB that penalizes people for being at range rather than penalizes people for being in melee (an option that melee toons don't really have the ability to take without crippling their damage output; ranged abilities are just as useful in melee as they are at range).

Which is what? 3-4 casts every 90 seconds or so? Even with the relatively short duration, the time investment in it is rather low overall. It's not like they're asking you to use up half of your animation time to keep your team buffed. At most, they're asking you to take a short break from demolishing the vast swaths of enemies before you to provide a massive buff to your team, which, in my eyes, seems to be a rather fair exchange. Increasing the duration on the buffs isn't needed since the fact that you have to apply those buffs is fundamentally the reason why those buffs are allowed to be so strong.

The total recharge floor is -75%. This does not mean that, when you check your global recharge, that the lowest you will see is -75%. This means that, after all debuffs and buffs are applied, the lowest an individual power will see is -75% total.

Imagine you have 150% +rech from global buffs and 95% +rech in the power. Your combat info will only register you as having 150% +rech. When you are hit with 100% -rech, it will register you as having 50% +rech, even though all of your powers really have 145% thanks to slotting. If the visible recharge bottom was only 75%, then you would never actually see any recharge below the baseline because you're always going to have that 95% that isn't factored into what you see because it's power dependent rather than character dependent.

*/Elec has Energize and Power Sink. Energize is a decent bit of */Elec's survivability, but it's a majority of your ability to survive. It also has Charged Armor, Conductive Shield, Static Shield, and Grounded, all of which function equally well regardless of your current -rech state, and Lightning Reflexes, which both provides +rech and debuff protection from the very same -rech.

*/Fire has Healing Flames, Burn, Consume, and Fiery Embrace. Burn, Consume, and Fiery Embrace all contribute to survivability by killing targets (which is kind of what -rech is kind of intend), Consume largely marginally, FE in much the same way as BU (so it's similarly marginal where -rech concerned since its primary survivability contribution is applied before -rech is actually applied), and Burn in a manner about as impressive as any other PbAoE attack from your primary. It also has Fire Shield, Plasma Shield, and Temperature Protection, all of which function no matter how much -rech is on you, and provide debuff protection to keep those clickies coming up.

*/Regen has Reconstruction, Dull Pain, Instant Healing, and Moment of Glory. 3 of those are integral to */Regen's baseline survivability (all but IH). Without them, it has to subsist on Integration, Fast Healing, and Resilience. FH and Resilience are essentially jokes because neither of them means much without some mitigation to actually make the values meaningful and Integration is great mainly because it's just a fancier version of FH.

I think I can make the claim, rather well actually, that */Regen is more recharge dependent than either of those builds since those other sets at least have some decent mitigation to rely on when their click powers are down. */Regen has some bare bones damage recovery which, while it looks good on paper, if that paper assumes that the only thing that matters is how long you can survive indefinitely which every single survivability index seems to care about, means about as much as the weather patterns in India do to a potato farmer in Idaho.

To not have something that every other set has and largely takes for granted but completely destroys the functionality of the set? Yes, it would need to be "so awesome" as to actually validate not having something that is fundamentally essential to the baseline survivability of the sets.

People keep screaming about the awesomenes of */Regen, but I really have to wonder if anyone has actually looked at how the set performs compared to other sets. In meaningful time frames, */Regen performs remarkably substandard and that's assuming that you're a friggin' god with those click powers. I'm tired of people screaming about the incredible awesomeness of */Regen largely because I'm pretty friggin' sure, from both my personal experience and from observations I've made of others, that */Regen isn't nearly as awesome as some of the other sets out there. About the only thing that */Regen really has going for it nowadays is a smooth ride for the first 20 or so levels, and that's not even something unique to */Regen.

Just look at the numbers and start asking yourself whether you'd rather have a */Regen or a */WP. Or a */Shield. Or a */Fire. Or an */Elec. In all of those cases, I can tell you with a large degree of certainty that the better option quite simply isn't */Regen, from a numerical perspective: */WP has better survivability except in a few edge cases and is simply easier to play; */Shield has better survivability and kills things faster and IOs better; */Fire and */Elec both have substantial damage recovery capabilities but also have the damage mitigation mechanisms to make them count for something without heavy IOing, not to mention they also provide superior kill speed and endurance assistance. I can tell you, without a doubt, that */Regen is not as awesome as people still think it is. If anything, it's probably nearing the bottom of the heap, what with the */Fire buffs recently, and the only reason that people keep thinking it's the devs' gift to Scrappers is because they still believe the fool notion that somehow damage recovery is better than damage mitigation because the ability for a target to sit there taking hits forever when a mitigation set would die after 5 minutes of being beat on. Seriously, it's a complete farce.

Knowing what I know now, I wouldn't touch */Regen if I were to start a character today. It doesn't have any real redeeming qualities and the only reason I really hold to using it anymore is because I like the playstyle (which the devs seem to have given a giant "**** you!" to with their new sets since they only seem to care about "toggle-on-and-lol" playstyles) and because I feel a sense of nostalgia and kinship for the set. Seriously ask yourself if you see any reason to roll */Regen rather than any other defensive set now that */Fire isn't a complete bust. The only possible contender I can think of is */DA, and that's only if you can't adapt your playstyle to endurance limited performance rather than because of actual numerical performance.

I think, at the very least, */Regen can ask for some ******* friggin' debuff resists when every other set seems to have gotten noticeably stronger over the years (with the sole exception of */Shield which the devs seem happy to allow to prance about at the absolute top of the heap without any serious contenders for the position, even with the nerf that ignored the real overpowered mechanism in the set), even in areas that the sets weren't even considered weak for (the Invuln passives got debuff resists, not because the set was considered weak, but because the devs thought that there wasn't enough reason to take those powers).

When you're talking about something that every other set gets and doesn't get appreciably factored into balance equations then I think the applicable question is "why not". You can make the claim that other sets got debuff resistance because they were too weak, but, honestly, can you really say that Invuln was too weak until it got the debuff resists in the passives? Debuff resistances are such a largely situational effect that it's impossible to make any decent claim that a set is disadvantaged without them unless you're willing to ask yourself why a set doesn't have them in the first place.

I've made that argument for recharge debuffs quite a lot actually. The fact that you ignore it whenever it comes up doesn't somehow stop it from existing. I've gone on quite long rants about how */Regen is more recharge dependent than any other set out there and how recharge is, in virtually all other cases, an offensive attribute (which you've made hilariously inaccurate counterarguments to largely because you don't actually bother reading my argument before making a response). I can make numerous cases that any amount of -rech is going to more negatively impact */Regen than any other set out there (not that it'll stop you from bringing up inappropriate examples as a counterargument).

If you want to have this argument again, I'm game for it, though don't expect me to bend over like people generally do for you. I'm actually going to hold you accountable to your ******** statements and force you to actually tackle the math in question rather than avoiding it with completely meaningless deflections.

I'm still waiting for an answer to the question of what makes */Regen so special that it's allowed to be the only set without any debuff resistance at all, though. Every other set is allowed to have debuff resistance to important attributes to the set's function. Is */Regen really just so awesome that it doesn't get anything to protect how it protects itself? Just trying to see if there's a double standard or something.

PS. I'm still waiting for you to finally realize that an assumption of indefinite survivability is a completely biased against sets with damage recovery capabilities.